7 Hadoop questions. Q2: Hadoop infrastructure choices

What is your preferred infrastructure for Hadoop deployments? That’s one of the primary questions being asked in the 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey. The answer will have significant implications for the future direction of Hadoop.

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While one of the primary benefits of Hadoop – low cost data storage – means that for many organisations the primary infrastructure for Hadoop has been commodity hardware, many systems and storage vendors now offer their own dedicated appliances and/or reference architecture for Hadoop.

We expect to see more of these dedicated Hadoop configurations as the incumbent infrastructure vendors look to cash-in on Hadoop adoption and try to add greater value.

We also see some companies exploring the potential for Hadoop in the cloud, as well as hosted deployments, and on virtual infrastructure – although those are arguably in the early stages of technical maturity, and adoption.

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Which infrastructure configurations are most popular? That’s one of the things our survey is designed to find out. The early results perhaps unsurprisingly indicate a greater preference for Hadoop being deployed on commodity hardware. However, cloud and virtual deployments have also scored well.

Interestingly, the early results show the preference for Hadoop on cloud infrastructure is significantly higher among respondents that are still in the development and test stage with Hadoop, which supports our anecdotal evidence about the use-cases for Hadoop in the cloud.

In order to get a little more detail on deployment preferences, the survey also asks about the level of consideration, testing and adoption for dedicated Hadoop hardware and Hadoop-as-a-service offerings respectively.

Among the choices in the dedicated hardware category are offerings from DataDirect Networks, Dell, HP, Oracle, IBM, Pivotal, Teradata, Cisco and NetApp.

The choices in the Hadoop-as-a-service category include Altiscale, Amazon EMR (including MapR), MapR on Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure HDInsight Service, Mortar Data, Qubole, Rackspace Big Data, SunGard Unified Analytics Services and Treasure Data.

To give your view on this and other questions related to the adoption of Hadoop, please take our 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey.