EMC Introduces World's Most Powerful Hadoop Distribution: Pivotal HD

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

• EMC's new Pivotal HD™ is an Apache Hadoop distribution that natively integrates the industry-leading EMC Greenplum massively parallel processing (MPP) database technology with the Apache Hadoop framework.
• The engineering innovation and technology called HAWQ™, brings Greenplum's decade of research and development on the industry's best MPP analytical database platform to Apache Hadoop, the open-source Big Data platform.
• New HAWQ technology brings more than 100X performance improvement (in some cases up to 600X) to a wide range of query types and workloads, making Pivotal HD the single most powerful Hadoop distribution in the industry.
• Pivotal HD with HAWQ represents the world's first true SQL processing for Hadoop, expanding the platform's reach to SQL programmers and developers, as well as enabling compatibility with traditional BI tools.

Full Story:

EMC® Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced a new distribution of Apache Hadoop: Pivotal HD. Pivotal HD features native integration of EMC's industry leading Greenplum® massively parallel processing (MPP) database with Apache Hadoop—the most cost-effective and flexible open source Big Data platform ever developed.  The new EMC Greenplum-developed HAWQ™ technology brings 10 years of large scale data management research and development to Hadoop and delivers more than 100X performance improvements when compared to existing SQL-like services on top of Hadoop, making Pivotal HD the single most powerful Hadoop distribution in the industry.

Hadoop has rapidly emerged as the preferred solution for Big Data analytics applications that grapple with vast repositories of unstructured data. It is flexible, scalable, inexpensive, fault-tolerant, and enjoys rapid adoption rates and a rich ecosystem surrounded by massive investment. However, customers face high hurdles to broadly adopting Hadoop as their singular data repository due to a lack of useful interfaces and high-level tooling for Business Intelligence and datamining—components that are critical to data analytics and building a data-driven enterprise. As the world's first true SQL processing for Hadoop, Pivotal HD addresses these challenges.

By offering the full spectrum of the SQL interface, and by extension, the entire ecosystem of products that support SQL, customers no longer need an army of developers to build a dashboard or run a report. Unlike competitive Hadoop distributions, Pivotal HD does this without moving data between systems or using connectors that require users to store the data twice. Pivotal HD cuts out the complexity of using Hadoop, thus expanding the platform's potential and productivity, and allowing customers to enjoy the benefits of the most cost-effective and flexible data processing platform ever developed.

About HAWQ

HAWQ (pronounced hawk) represents the EMC Greenplum engineering effort that brings 10 years of large-scale data management research and development to the Apache Hadoop framework. Leveraging the feature richness and maturity of the industry leading Greenplum MPP analytical database, this innovation has resulted in the world's first true SQL parallel database on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). HAWQ is the key differentiating technology in making Pivotal HD the world's most powerful Hadoop distribution. Capabilities of note include Dynamic Pipelining, a world-class query optimizer, horizontal scaling, SQL compliant, interactive query, deep analytics, and support for common Hadoop formats.

Pivotal HD and HAWQ Deliver:

• True SQL Query Capabilities – With Pivotal HD's advanced database services (HAWQ) enterprises can now unlock the potential of Hadoop's scalable, fault-tolerant storage capabilities by bringing to bear the vast pool of "data worker" tools and languages into the Hadoop ecosystems.  With Pivotal HD's support for true, SQL-standards compliant query interfaces data mining tools, SQL-trained data analysts, and standard BI tools can now easily connect to, query, and analyze data sets stored in the Hadoop file system (HDFS).
• Unprecedented Query Performance – Bringing over 10 years of parallel database processing technology to Hadoop, Pivotal HD delivers query response time improvements that are up to 600x faster than current SQL-like interfaces for Hadoop.
• Robust Operational Support – Command Center enables administrators and developers to easily install and manage large clusters from interactive web user interfaces.  Command Center also exposes Command Line Interface for scripting and programmer friendly web services API for complex automation tasks. Using Command Center administrators can deploy large cluster, configure services/roles, manage services and monitor HDFS jobs and tasks.

Hadoop -- The Foundation for Change

EMC believes that Hadoop has the potential to reach beyond Big Data to catalyze new levels of business productivity and transformation. As the foundation for change in business, Hadoop represents an unprecedented opportunity to improve how organizations can get the most value from large amounts of data. Businesses that rely on Hadoop as the core of their infrastructure can not only do analytics on top of vast amounts of data, but can also go beyond analytics and the foundation for that data layer to build applications that are meaningful, and that have a very tightly coupled relationship with the data. Consumer Internet companies have reaped the benefits of this approach, and EMC believes more traditional enterprises will adopt the same model as they evolve and transform their businesses.

Pivotal HD is expected to be available at the end of the first quarter of this year as a software-only or appliance-based solution, backed by EMC's global 24x7 support infrastructure.

Executive Quotes:

Scott Yara, senior vice president of products, Greenplum, a division of EMC

"Hadoop is a big deal and poised, for many enterprises, as the key to unlock Big Data's transformational potential. Marrying the extraordinary capabilities of the Greenplum technology—essentially the Greenplum crown jewels—with this amazing open-source phenomenon has been no small feat. But we're 'all in' — investing in a manner that no other company is — to help catapult Hadoop into wide-scale adoption."

Steven Hirsch, chief data officer, SVP Global Data Services, NYSE Euronext

"With Pivotal HD, we can check off many of the items on our Hadoop wish-list—things like plug-in support for the ecosystem of tools, improved data management and greater elasticity in terms of the storage and compute layer. But above all, it provides true SQL query interfaces for data workers and tools—not a superficial implementation of the kind that's so common today, but a native implementation that delivers the capability of real and true SQL processing and optimization. Having a single Hadoop infrastructure for Big Data investigation and analysis changes everything. Now add to all of this functionality the fact that the SQL performance is up to 100x faster than other offerings and you have an environment that we at NYSE Euronext are extremely excited about."

Jeff Kelly, Big Data analyst, The Wikibon Project

"By integrating the Greenplum database natively within Hadoop, Pivotal HD opens up Big Data analytics to a new class of practitioner – the savvy business user –providing both real-time query responsiveness via a familiar SQL interface and eliminating the need to move data back and forth between Hadoop and separate analytic databases. Most importantly, by providing both real-time and batch analytics capabilities in a single environment, Pivotal HD moves Hadoop several steps closer to realizing its full potential as the de facto, comprehensive Big Data platform of the 21^st century."

John Myers, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates 

"The Pivotal HD release reflects the results of recent Enterprise Management Associates Big Data Research and our vision for the Hybrid Data Ecosystem.  With the sharing of a common data store via HDFS and processing information based on business requirements via either a SQL or NoSQL access, Pivotal recognizes that different analytical challenges require different processing/access layers."  

Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing and product management, EMC Isilon

"The introduction of Pivotal HD, combined with EMC Isilon's native integration of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol, continues the evolution of the industry's first and only enterprise-proven Hadoop solution on a scale-out NAS architecture. This powerful combination succeeds in reducing the complexities traditionally associated with Hadoop deployments and allows enterprises to easily extract business value from unstructured data."

Partners Supporting the Pivotal HD announcement:

Find out what our partners are saying about Pivotal HD by clicking here.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Pivotal HD
• Read more about Pivotal HD on EMC Pulse, EMC's news and technology blog
• Read the blog from Greenplum Solutions Architect Donald Miner: Introducing Pivotal HD
• Interview: Former CTO for the Obama 2012 Campaign Harper Reed on the Power of Data, at Hadoop: the Foundation for Change
• For the latest industry news, research, webcasts and use cases covering Big Data, analytics, and the data scientist community visit the Greenplum Media Center
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Greenplum

About Greenplum, a division of EMC

Greenplum, a division of EMC, is driving the future of Big Data analytics with breakthrough products that harness the skills of data science teams to help global organizations realize the full promise of business agility and become data-driven, predictive enterprises. The division's products include Greenplum® Unified Analytics Platform, Greenplum® Data Computing Appliance, Greenplum® Database, Greenplum® Analytics Lab, Greenplum® HD and Greenplum® Chorus™. They embody the power of open systems, cloud computing, virtualization and social collaboration, enabling global organizations to gain greater insight and value from their data than ever before possible. Learn more at www.greenplum.com

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

EMC, Greenplum, HAWQ, Pivotal HD, and Chorus are trademarks or registered trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws.  Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) component and product quality and availability; (vi) fluctuations in VMware, Inc.'s operating results and risks associated with trading of VMware stock; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) risks associated with managing the growth of our business, including risks associated with acquisitions and investments and the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (ix) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (x) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; (xii) threats and other disruptions to our secure data centers or networks; (xiii) our ability to protect our proprietary technology; (xiv) war or acts of terrorism; and (xv) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.  EMC disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

SOURCE EMC Corporation