Rackspace And Hortonworks Launch Managed Hadoop Hosting

Rackspace has launched support for the Hortonworks Data Platform, a solution built on Apache Hadoop open source analytics framework, as part of its managed hosting services.

The new Managed Big Data Platform allows customers to deploy fully featured and supported Hadoop infrastructure through a single contract with the company, with no upfront investment, making analytics more accessible to smaller businesses.

“By combining the open source commitments of Rackspace and Hortonworks, we are creating a platform of capabilities that accelerates the adoption of open standards, while continuing to deliver expertise to the broader Hadoop community,” said John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing at Hortonworks.

The elephant beckons

Rackspace already offers traditional relational database solutions, as well as NoSQL offerings serving MongoDB and Redis-based applications, and on Monday, it expanded this list.

The Hortonworks software allows for the distributed processing of huge data sets across clusters of commodity hardware, thanks to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Hadoop MapReduce programming model, both based on the ideas originally developed at Google.

To complement Hortonworks Data Platform, Rackspace offers customised infrastructure configurations that can focus on either high compute or high storage, depending on the needs of the project.

The company said the new service reduces the amount of time required to deploy and maintain data processing environments and promised support for patching, cluster management, job execution and standard maintenance.

“Companies need help analysing and extracting value from this vast amount of information, as Big Data solutions are difficult to deploy and harder to maintain,” said John Engates, CTO at Rackspace.  “With Rackspace’s Managed and Cloud Big Data Platform offerings, we’re providing an open, hybrid Big Data solution for dedicated and cloud instances.”

What do you know about wearable computing? Take our quiz!