VMware's Serengeti Brings Hadoop To Virtual, Cloud Environments 28
Nerval's Lobster writes "VMware's Serengeti is a new open-source project for deploying Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments. Serengeti 0.5 is available as a free download under the Apache 2.0 license. It has been designed as distro-neutral, with support for Apache 1.0, CDH3, Hortonworks 1.0 and Greenplum HD 1.0. Of course, VMware isn't the only company seeking to leverage the increased interest in Hadoop. In June alone, midsize IT vendors such as Datameer, Karmasphere, and Hortonworks have all announced platforms that utilize the framework in some way. Research firm IDC recently predicted that worldwide revenues from Hadoop and MapReduce will hit $812.8 million in 2016, up from $77 million in 2011."
Re:I have to admit... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, of course you can manually set up Hadoop in whatever environment, but it's a pain and generally speaking management is annoying. This new project appears to alleviate at least some of that, making it easy to remotely deploy and manage a Hadoop cluster. At least, that's what I got from the demo video - there's probably more to it.
Regarding Hadoop, I'm always surprised by its popularity given the relative fragility of HDFS (the NameNode is a single point of failure; other distributed filesystems have beaten this problem) and the dubious, beta-like quality of the tools built on top of it (Pig, etc.)
Re:Shiny - High Revenue (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who actually uses Hadoop, you're so far off the mark you've hit a bystander in the head. Dealing with large amount of data is a major PITA. If you don't understand that then you must never have worked with anything but trivial data sets. Hadoop fixes much of it, period. Without having to spend insane amount of money on databases, DBAs and still not being able to scale properly. It's not optimal but it works, it scales and it's flexible.
That's why companies are moving to it.