Rackspace Supercharges Big Data With New Hadoop and Spark Bare Metal Solutions — forbes.com

Rackspace made some noise yesterday at the Strata + Hadoop World conference currently taking place in New York’s Jacob Javits Center, which could have a major impact in the field of big data analytics. The company announced new offerings it’s calling the OnMetal Cloud Big Data Platform that essentially gives customers bare metal access to Hadoop clusters with Spark via the cloud. “This solution breaks new ground for the world of big data,” said John Engates, CTO, Rackspace. “For the first time, Hadoop and Spark can have the best of both worlds: bare metal performance with cloud agility…” Rackspace has been offering customers the ability to leverage Hadoop via the cloud, but the previous solutions were virtualized, which can result in significant performance penalties due to the shared resources of virtual machines. With its OnMetal Cloud Big Data Platform though, Rackspace can now offer powerful, dedicated hardware, i.e. “bare metal”, and all of the performance advantages that come with it, via the cloud. Previously, bare metal access for Hadoop required on-site installations that also needed to be maintained and managed. By offering fully managed Hadoop and Spark hardware and software via its Managed Cloud, Rackspace’s pitch is that OnMetal can save customers time and money by eliminating the need to deploy and maintain the setup on their own, but still reap the benefits of dedicated hardware.

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