MapR Brings Open Source Hadoop to Github and Ubuntu Linux
Big Data startup MapR is expanding its open source and Linux footprint this week.
MapR recently announced a $30 Million round of funding that will drive forward the company's efforts. Now MapR wants to expand developer engagement and fuel its partner ecosystem.
MapR's Big Data distribution is based on open source technology and is now being released on Github, a popular open source project repository and collaborative development resource.
Jack Norris, VP of marketing at MapR, explained to Enterprise Apps Today that MapR technology has long combined open source projects with MapR's own innovation.
“The way it worked is that we provided customers with the patches that MapR has done on top of the Apache projects,” Norris explained. “We've now made it much easier for customers to obtain the complete code and make their modifications.”
Github vs Commercial
The open source code post on the MapR Github pages is not exactly the same as MapR's commercial product. MapR offers three editions of its Hadoop distribution: M3, M5 and M7. M3 is the free edition.
Norris noted that the M5 and M7 editions include all of the open source packages, with additional platform innovations to provide enterprise-grade features such as mirroring, snapshots, instant recovery, NFS HA and data placements control for HBase and Hadoop.
Ubuntu Linux
In addition to making its open source code available on Github, MapR also announced a partnership with Ubuntu Linux vendor Canonical.
“The partnership bundle is focused on the free M3 edition,” Norris explained. “There’s the potential for customers to upgrade to receive additional functionality.”
As part of the Canonical partnership, the MapR deb packages have been enhanced and are now published in the standard Ubuntu repository.
“In addition, through the integration with Canonical's Juju system, a MapR cluster can be set up on any cluster of Ubuntu machines in seconds,” Norris said. “The user doesn't need to come to MapR; it's all provided by Canonical.”
Juju is a service based approach that is baked into Ubuntu Linux. With Juju, administrators deploy Juju “charms” to enable a particular service or application.
Hadoop Competition Heats up
The market for commercial Hadoop Big Data distributions is a very competitive one. Multiple firms, including EMC, Cloudera and Hortonworks, are all vying for a piece of the Big Data pie. At the end of 2011, over $350 million of venture capital had already poured into the Big Data market.
“MapR has developed some unique and powerful innovations to provide ease of use, dependability and performance to Hadoop,” Norris said. “MapR has designed and implemented a purpose-built architecture specifically for high performance.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the Quinstreet Enterprise Network. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
