We recently speculated that EMC Greenplum’s focus on the integration of its Greenplum HD Hadoop distribution with its Data Computing Appliance (DCA) and Isilon storage technology would mean an increasingly niche role for Greenplum MR- the Hadoop distribution based on MapR’s M5.
Two recent announcements indicate that niche might continue to be a lucrative one for MapR, however. First, Cisco released details of a reference architecture for deploying Greenplum MR on Cisco’s UCS servers. Then Informatica announced a partnership with MapR to jointly support its Data Integration Platform running on MapR’s distribution for Hadoop.
The Informatica relationship also covers bi-directional data integration with Informatica PowerCenter and Informatica PowerExchange, snapshot replication using Informatica FastClone, and data streaming into MapR’s distribution via NFS using Informatica Ultra Messaging. In addition, In addition, the free Informatica HParser Community Edition will be available for download as part of the MapR distribution.
While the partnership with Informatica is a direct one for MapR, the Cisco reference architecture announcement illustrates that the benefit MapR gains from its relationship with EMC Greenplum includes exploiting the company’s leverage with potential partners.