MapR Reaches Beyond Big Data Crunching to Help Customers Win
Most big data vendors say that they are visionary — that they invented Hadoop, were the first to embrace Spark, can process big data in the cloud, analyze IoT data as it streams…
All of that may be true.
Big data cruncher MapR has always emphasized processing power, time to actionable insights, security, enterprise worthiness and total cost of ownership — things that CEO’s, CIOs and CTOs care a great deal about.
To be fair, MapR has done this at the expense of other things, like the very hip practice of contributing all of their code to an Apache Software Foundation project, but they make no apologies.
“We sell enterprise software,” MapR founder and board chairman John Schroeder has said over and over again. And though they leverage open source technologies in their solutions, their crown jewel, the Converged Data Platform (CDP) is patented.
So in order for them to succeed in an open source world, they have to make software that’s better, easier to use and support and more strategic than anything else on the market. Moreover they have to out-innovate the competition and the products that they bring to market.
MapR is doing that again today with its announcement of MapR-XD, a cloud-scale data fabric that extends its Converged Data Platform to create a cloud-scale data store to manage files and containers.
“Cloud-scale,” according to Vikram Gupta, senior director product management, MapR, can mean anywhere from five to thousands of nodes — data can be at the edge (think IoT), in the cloud (including multiple clouds) and/or the data center. It can be “hot”, warm or cold.
Moreover, with CDP, batch, interactive, and real-time data can be stored on the same cluster.
What’s the big deal aside from being able to quickly analyze and usurp value from all of your available data, regardless of where it is stored ( edge, data center the cloud) when you’re trying to catch a crook or win a sale before the customer goes to a competitor’s site or walks out of the mall?
The digital economy calls for a different kind of data store — a single, scalable storage platform that is available around the globe and around the clock that is globally accessible, globally protected and globally managed.
“We are the only ones who can do this at speed, at scale, and reliably,” says Gupta.
And this isn’t something MapR is testing out, it has customers who have been using an unproductized version of MapR-XD for years and they’ve liked the results.
So it made sense for MapR to turn it into a product.
MapR-XD is a data fabric that is one system that is massively scalable and extremely efficient, according to Gupta. Not only that, but it performs well on commodity hardware.
“Customers are tired of paying for IBM and EMC (now Dell-EMC) boxes,” says Gupta.
He cites SAP as a case and point. “They chose MapR-XD as the fabric for Hana,” he says, noting that SAP did rigorous testing during the selection process.
“They tried to break it, they pulled the cable,” he says.
Mobile broad-band telecommunications provider Ericsson is using MapR-XD to store and manage big data and they don’t even use Hadoop or Spark, according to Gupta.
“Big data isn’t just Hadoop or Spark,”he says, adding that customers come to MapR after they’ve tested the limits of other vendors.
To be clear, MapR, with MapR-XD, isn’t entering the data storage business per-se, trying to knock the likes of Isilon off of their pedestals. Instead it is doing what it does best — innovating new products that are fundamental to making money, saving money and securing the enterprise for the evolving digital economy.
