News

BlueData Emerges from Stealth Mode with Big Data Platform for Everyone

• By David Ramel
• 10/02/2014

BlueData Software Inc. recently launched its EPIC Enterprise platform with the goal to "democratize" Big Data by making it more accessible to enterprises of all sizes that might lack the specialized talent and resources of larger companies such as Web powerhouses Facebook and Google commonly associated with cutting-edge hyperscale analytics.

The Silicon Valley start-up emerged from stealth mode while announcing its technology -- with patents pending -- designed to provide Big Data analytics through self-service, on-premises private clouds.

"With the release of EPIC, BlueData is democratizing Big Data by streamlining and simplifying Big Data infrastructure and eliminating complexity as a barrier to adoption," the company said. "Enterprises of all sizes can now build agile, secure and cost-effective Big Data deployments that deliver value in days instead of months and at a cost savings of 50 percent to 75 percent compared with traditional approaches. By making Big Data accessible to all, enterprises can get the same value out of their on-premise Big Data as companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo at a fraction of the cost, and with far fewer resources."

BlueData cited problems with existing "rigid, complex and expensive" Big Data infrastructure that wasn't purposely built to handle Big Data workloads or meet the needs of data scientists. While some companies have the resources to work around problems with the traditional infrastructure, others have not, BlueData said, and many projects haven't moved beyond initial pilot projects.

"Ninety percent of Wikibon practitioners tell us they plan to shift workloads from traditional data warehouse platforms to Hadoop," BlueData quoted Wikibon researcher David Vellante as saying. "However, complexity remains a major adoption barrier for their organizations because they often lack sufficient budget, skills and resources to get the job done. BlueData's EPIC platform directly attacks this problem and can make Big Data a reality by delivering the ability to work with any storage, any server and any application within a private cloud infrastructure."

The news comes almost one year after the company -- co-founded by former VMware executives -- received $15 million in Series B financing.

The BlueData offering is a cluster virtualization layer installed between the underlying physical systems and related Big Data distributions and applications. The company said this provides benefits of private clouds such as multi-tenancy, data isolation, elasticity, security and control. The platform provides a role-based Web portal to help users provision, manage and administer their Big Data infrastructure using patent-pending technologies named DataTap, IOBoost and ElasticPlane.

DataTap eliminates the need to move and duplicate data, providing Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) abstraction to run unmodified Big Data applications. It also provides optimized connections to NFS, Swift API, Gluster and Ceph.

IOBoost increases performance via hierarchical application-aware caching and tiering, allowing single-copy data transfer from physical storage devices to VMs. The company said it provides performance comparable to bare-metal Big Data implementations.

ElasticPlane uses modern hypervisor and container technologies and a modular cloud architecture to enable the fast provisioning of self-service, multi-tenant clusters. Management of resources and service-level agreements (SLAs) occurs through a sophisticated policy engine, the company said.

The EPIC platform supports other Big Data technologies also, including Hadoop 1.0, YARN, MapReduce, Hive, Pig, HBase, Impala and Spark.

On the same day of the EPIC launch, BlueData also announced it had joined the Hortonworks Technology Partner program and was awarded Hortonworks certification.

"BlueData makes Hadoop adoption much simpler and more flexible for a wide range of industries that don't have enough IT architects to keep up with the Big Data application demand," said Hortonworks exec John Kreisa. "They are empowering our customers to create Hadoop clusters in minutes so they can run their jobs immediately and take advantage of the insights from the data." BlueData has also teamed up with Cloudera Inc. and Databricks Inc., among other companies.

BlueData also announced a free community edition, EPIC ONE, available for download. "It's a full-featured version of our software that allows you to experience the power of multi-app, multi-version instant clusters on a single physical node," said company co-founder and CEO Kumar Sreekanti in a blog post, where he explained how the company got started.