IBM Delivers New Platform to Help Clients Address Storage Challenges at Massive Scale

IBM and Hortonworks announced the planned availability of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP®) for IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and IBM Spectrum Scale. The agreement with Hortonworks will lead to certification of Hortonworks HDP on Power with IBM Spectrum Scale and Hortonworks HDP on x86 with IBM Spectrum Scale.

With the recent announcement of availability of Hortonworks HDP on POWER8 platform, IBM clients already have increased choice when selecting the platform for their Hadoop distribution. This new agreement will enable IBM clients to also leverage their existing and future investments in IBM storage in deploying Hadoop based big data applications. Additionally, this agreement will provide existing Hortonworks HDP customers an enterprise-class storage alternative with IBM Spectrum Scale for their Hadoop and Spark workloads.

The agreement represents the first IBM Storage offering and industry first enterprise Software Defined Storage solution certified for Hortonworks.

When completed, the HDP certifications will provide a significant layer of confidence to existing IBM and future clients. Those users can now run Hadoop applications on the leading software-defined storage solutions. IBM clients will have the benefits of enterprise storage to analyze data in place with Hortonworks analytics applications. With the choice of centralized or distributed deployments, organizations can improve business efficiency with the data management, backup, security and hybrid cloud storage.

“Every organization is becoming a digital organization. With this announcement IBM is delivering a powerful platform to extend the use of data and for cognitive applications,” said Ed Walsh, general manager for IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. This announcement shows our partner community IBM’s commitment to help client’s grow, develop, and transform the use of their own data with less complexity.”

“This agreement further expands our relationship with IBM, continuing our relentless focus on customer value and success” said Chris Sullivan, SVP Global Channels and Alliances, Hortonworks. “With the data expertise of Hortonworks and leading storage technology from IBM, these certified offerings will help customers accelerate adoption of their modern data applications.”

The IBM Elastic Storage Server is a modern implementation of software-defined storage, combining IBM Spectrum Scale software with IBM POWER8® processor-based servers and storage solutions. Clearly differentiating IBM Spectrum Scale from other products in the market is its parallel file system architecture, which is ideal for the massive scaling of performance and capacity needed in today’s cognitive and big data analytic workloads.

By eliminating the need to copy data from enterprise storage to a separate analytics platform IBM clients can more quickly respond to data based queries. Key benefits of HDP for IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and IBM Spectrum Scale include:

·      Better storage efficiency – unlike HDFS which creates three copies of every piece of data, IBM ESS uses erasure coding, eliminating the need for multiple copies and increasing storage efficiency.

·      Hybrid Storage – extends on premise storage to the cloud and therefore realizing a myriad of economic, security, accessibility and other benefits.

·      High Performance – as an optimized, highly parallel storage solution ESS is capable of high-speed data throughput able to exceed the performance of distributed HDFS.

“Our clients are considering big data analytics as a top priority; they understand that it is imperative to get insight into their data to improve competitiveness in the market,” said Heena Raval, Sr. Solutions Architect, Sycomp Information and Technology Solutions. “They work with Sycomp because of our expertise in deploying high performance solutions with IBM’s Spectrum Scale to manage today’s data-intensive workloads. The certification of Hortonworks HDP will certainly help us to expedite these deployments and ensure IBM Spectrum Scale is a leading technology to manage the data workloads of tomorrow.”

IBM is one of the founding partners of Open Data Platform and has helped pave the way to enable any company to join the Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi). The focus is on innovating around the Apache Hadoop open source core, growing the ecosystem and enabling solutions on a standardized Open Data Platform across the ecosystem partners. IBM Big Insights, IBM’s own Hadoop and Spark distribution, is also an option for clients who prefer to run IBM’s own analytics software on IBM Spectrum Scale Storage.