SEATTLE, Wash. – January 16, 2013 – Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced the availability of pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) Enterprise templates in the Skytap Cloud public template library. With the release, Skytap’s enterprise customers gain on-demand, self-service access to Cloudera’s leading open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, including the Cloudera Enterprise free edition, which can be used to deploy and manage physical or virtual clusters of up to 50 nodes. Skytap’s Cloudera Hadoop templates are ideal for enterprise developers, testers, data scientists and IT professionals who are interested in quickly learning more about Hadoop, experimenting with its capabilities, and developing proof-of-concepts for big data offerings.
“Big data has such a vast size that it exceeds the capacity of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone,” said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner in a report titled “’Big Data’ Is Only The Beginning of Extreme Information Management.” “The largest datasets will require the use of public or private cloud computing resources to achieve periodic and on-demand scaling.”
With Skytap’s enterprise-ready Cloudera Hadoop templates, customers can easily create virtual Hadoop cluster environments in less than ten minutes, without the need to procure costly in-house hardware. The Skytap templates allow users to create, spin-up, suspend, save, and tear down Hadoop clusters of various sizes as needed. The templates also eliminate the complexity and time required to manually download, install, configure, and network together all of the required software and hardware components – providing Skytap customers with unprecedented fast and easy access to Hadoop clusters.
Using Skytap Cloud’s multi-VPN capability, Skytap customers can create a secure hybrid cloud and gain added flexibility to run Hadoop cluster nodes on-premise coupled with additional Hadoop cluster nodes that run in Skytap Cloud. This enables fast, on-demand scaling of Hadoop cluster environments for periodic project needs where large datasets require additional compute, memory, storage, and networking resources.
The hybrid cloud Hadoop cluster can be managed as a single, unified cluster on-premise or from within Skytap Cloud. This provides customers with a flexible option to periodically scale-out Hadoop clusters on-demand using a combination of on-premise and securely connected hybrid cloud compute resources. Customers benefit from increased speed and flexibility, and avoid the cost of purchasing additional on-premise hardware to meet peak scaling needs.
The pre-installed, pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop templates in Skytap Cloud include cluster compute nodes and a management/server node featuring Cloudera Manager, a full-featured automation tool for CDH clusters. The templates provide enterprise users with complete multi-machine, multi-networked environments, and enable users with fast, remote access and root-level control of all virtual machines (VMs). To help customers scale Hadoop clusters to fit their needs, Skytap Cloud offers a base Cloudera CDH4 Hadoop multi-node cluster template plus an additional single-node template that allows for the easy, fast addition of more nodes to the base cluster. Using the Cloudera Manager Free edition, users can perform basic configuration and administration tasks for HDFS, MapReduce, Hue, Oozie and ZooKeeper.
By deploying Hadoop clusters within Skytap Cloud, users also benefit from Skytap’s SmartClient™, AutoNetworks™, CloudControl™ and SmartShare™ technologies. Virtual environments are automatically networked and isolated, multi-VPN connections create a secure hybrid cloud extension to on-premise datacenters, users have fast, remote root access to all machines, and IT has visibility, control, and management of Skytap Cloud resources.
“Hadoop has forever changed the way enterprises manage big data. Skytap is transforming the way businesses deploy and benefit from big data solutions by introducing Cloudera Hadoop templates for enterprise hybrid clouds,” said Brad Schick, vice president of engineering at Skytap. “By utilizing Cloudera Hadoop within Skytap Cloud, businesses can drive faster time to value by eliminating the need to procure in-house hardware and avoid the complexity and expertise required to download, install and configure all of the required components. For engineers, the environment is right there in Skytap Cloud and ready to go.”
