Hadoop <3's Bulk Storage

We have touched on Hadoop before in our blog, first announcing our partnership with Hortonworks, back in February of 2014, and more recently on our Big Data Solutions Page. Hadoop is a powerful open source framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models, making it an excellent Big Data tool. Hadoop can benefit from the operational efficiencies of Cloud-A’s elastic, API driven infrastructure-as-a-service – and it is a growing use case among our users.

There are many aspects of our compute that lend themselves to successful Hadoop deployments on Cloud-A, like our Big Data High Memory® and Big Data High Compute® instance flavours that provide the scale and power for the biggest jobs, but there are other elements of Cloud-A infrastructure-a-service that make it an ideal host for Hadoop Big Data solutions.

Let’s take a look at how you can leverage Cloud-A Bulk Storage, our object storage product, as a reliable, scalable and cost-effective Big Data repository for your Hadoop platform.

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MongoDB NoSQL database on Cloud-A

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Cloud-A provides a flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure platform to allow users to select the right tool for each job. Cloud-A has recently announced its technology partnership with MongoDB, to provide a supported, scalable NoSQL solution for Cloud-A users.

MongoDB is a next generation database for modern application architecture that accelerates time-to-market with less resources, reduces risk for mission-critical deployments all with a lower total cost of ownership when compared to other NoSQL databases.

This whitepaper outlines 

  • Introduction to NoSQL Databases
  • Benefits of NoSQL Databases
  • MongoDB Use Cases
  • MongoDB on Cloud-A
  • Best practices

 

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Cloud-A Becomes MongoDB Technology Partner

We are happy to announce that Cloud-A is now a MongoDB technology partner. MongoDB is the world’s fastest growing database ecosystem,  and we are excited to be a part of it!

This new partnership helps allow our users to build better solutions on Cloud-A infrastructure with the tools they want. Deployed where and how they want.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, MongoDB is a NoSQL database for today’s applications, enabling users to:

  • Leverage data and technology to maximize competitive advantage
  • Reduce risk for mission-critical deployments
  • Accelerate time-to-value
  • Dramatically lower total cost of ownership

MongoDB works particularly well for Big Data and operational intelligence solutions, product data management, mobile app backends, IoT (Internet of Things) apps and Content Management Systems (CMS) due to its agility, scalability and performance.

Stay Tuned!

Stay tuned for more information on how our partnership with MongoDB will benefit you! Be on the lookout for a Whitepaper and some technical blog posts to enable successful MongoDB deployments on Cloud-A.

Big Data in the Cloud

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We have been seeing an increasing demand for Big Data workflows on Cloud-A. Many companies, big and small are looking for greater business intelligence to make more informed decisions more quickly and get ahead of the competition. The public cloud provides an ideal home for many organization’s Big Data platforms as it reduces the initial investment in hardware and also prevents the ongoing problem of over allocating or under allocating infrastructure resources.
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We find that many companies are looking for a guiding hand on selecting their Big Data framework, whether Hadoop or Spark, but at the end of the day, we feel that choosing the right elastic infrastructure platform will be the biggest, and most important decision you make in building out a Big Data solution. We do not necessarily believe that an organization should choose “one solution or the other” (Hadoop or Spark) but they should have the agility and flexibility to select the right tool for each job.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of running your Big Data systems on Cloud-A

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Object Storage 101

OS101 logoWith the massive amount of growth in unstructured data Canadian organizations are seeing as a result of mega trends like Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine to Machine communications (M2M,) a reliable, redundant and scalable storage medium is required to handle it. Object storage is the perfect solution for many storage applications for unstructured data.

This whitepaper outlines 

  • What is Object Storage?
  • Why Object Storage?
  • Object Storage benefits
  • What problems does Object Storage solve?
  • Trends in object storage
  • Popular Use Cases

 

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Time to Spring Clean your SAN – Bulk Storage for Data Archival

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It is no secret that the amount of the data everywhere is growing. Terms like IoT, Big Data and M2M have a certain hype cycle around them, but at the end of the day they are all very relevant concepts. The requirements for data storage are growing at over 50% per year and IDC and EMC predict that the “digital universe” will amount to over 40,000EB, or 5,200GB per person on the planet, by 2020 – the majority of which is unstructured data.

Data Management and Internal Cost per GB

One of the biggest struggles for organizations in the coming years will be to manage these large, growing pools of data. Most enterprises utilize Storage Area Network (SAN technology) for their primary internal storage requirements, which leverage super fast storage media (SSD, Flash) and fibre channel networking to offer lightning fast IOPS and redundancy. The problem with SAN technology is that it is expensive. Every organization will have a different cost per gigabyte of storage, as it depends on many factors including: the type of SAN (FC/iSCSI,) the manufacturer and model, Capacity licensing , Support requirements and Type/capacity/speed of disks supported
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Press Release – Cloud A Becomes Hortonworks Infrastructure Partner

HWX_Badges_Cert_HDPHalifax, Nova Scotia, Canada – Feb 24, 2014 – Cloud A, a leader in open cloud infrastructure solutions for Big Data, announced today that it has forged a partnership with Hortonworks a leading commercial vendor promoting the innovation, development and support of Apache Hadoop. The agreement will enable Cloud A to enable the acceleration and adoption of Apache Hadoop by organizations who wish to have their data reside in Canadian data centers.

Enterprises everywhere are racing to deploy Apache Hadoop to enhance their data management capabilities. Cloud A in conjunction with it’s partner community are developing solutions that will make it easier for enterprise customers to deploy and manage Hadoop by leveraging the leading technologies from both vendors to create the first enterprise Hadoop solution that handles everything from deployment on bare metal all the way to the application.

Cloud A will combine the Hortonworks Data Platform with Cloud A’s Openstack Canadian open cloud to create an integrated solution that addresses the problems enterprise data centers experience when developing Hadoop solutions internally. The Hortonworks Data Platform powered by Apache Hadoop, is a massively scalable, 100 percent open source platform for storing, processing and analyzing large volumes of data. The platform includes the most popular and essential Apache Hadoop projects including HDFS, MapReduce, HCatalog, Pig, Hive, HBase and Zookeeper. These combined solutions will make it easier to bring a Hadoop project from proof-of-concept, to production, to scale-out.

“We are very excited to be able to offer a Canadian Openstack powered cloud to deploy Hadoop solutions for enterprise customers that addresses the often overlooked problem of setting up and managing the underlying cluster for Hadoop,” said Brandon Kolybaba CEO of Cloud A. “Hortonworks thought leadership in the space is exceptional and we are very excited to work with them to leverage the advanced technologies, and support infrastructure for Apache Hadoop.”

About Cloud A
Cloud A is a leading provider of Cloud Infrastructure powered by Openstack based in Canada. Our product simplifies the installation and management of the hardware and software that provides the infrastructure for large scale environments having hundreds or thousands of servers supporting Big Data, Analytics, or High Performance Computing. For more information visit www.CloudA.ca

Contact:
Jacob Godin
Cloud A (CloudA.ca)
902-442-4064
Jacob.Godin@CloudA.ca