Intel Hadoop

Intel is competing with the likes of Hortonworks and Cloudera and others in the commercial Hadoop market. The rise of such vendors underscores the fact that Hadoop is really at a crossroads. Linux only took off once companies began investing in hardening its features and also coalesced around keeping it open.

Customers who choose Intel's Hadoop distribution over others can benefit from what Intel describes as significant performance improvements thanks to optimizations for Intel's Xeon processors, solid state storage and networking.

Intel also offers speedier data encryption and decryption within Hadoop with its AES-NI tecnology, according to the vendor. Along with security and reliability upgrades, the Data Platform features capabilities for streaming data processing, iterative analytics and graph processing, according to Intel.

Ref: https://hadoop.intel.com/

Qubole

Qubole is a Big Data as a Service (BDaas) Platform Running on Leading Cloud Offerings like AWS.

Qubole Data Service (QDS) has more than a dozen data connectors for importing and exporting data to and from the platform. The core is Qubole’s managed Hadoop platform, including Hive, Sqoop, Pig and Oozie and an SK for building applications in Python.

It recently added Presto, an open-source project supporting SQL-style analytics on Big Data, created by Facebook, which says it is orders of magnitude faster than Hive, returning query results in milliseconds. Hadoop clusters include auto-scaling. MapReduce job and SQL-style queries can be created on an interactive GUI.

The benefits of a service like QDS, are the elimination of capital expenditures on hardware and challenges of hiring and retaining scarce Big Data practitioners.

VMware vCenter Log Insight

As virtualization administrators were forced to branch out from their original comfort zones of server administration to storage, network, and even desktop administration, the next technological leap for these individuals will therefore come in the form of big data and analytics. As in other areas in the server virtualization world, companies like VMware are making an app for that in order to make that transition easier.

VMware vCenter Log Insight debuted back in June 2013, as a result of VMware's August 2012 acquisition of Pattern Insight.Common use cases for the product include security and compliance auditing, as well as monitoring and troubleshooting vSphere and other servers, storage, and networking devices.

Earlier in the month of Jan 2014, VMware released vCenter Log Insight 1.5. The bulk of the work done on this release was to make it a more enterprise-ready product. As an example, VMware added authentication support for Microsoft's Active Directory for easier integration into an enterprise environment. This eliminates the need for multiple logins/passwords and allows for seamless integration into an organization's pre-existing identity management architecture.