Rackspace launches Big Data Solution and Managed Support for ApacheTM Hadoop®

“The volume of data being processed in businesses today is astounding. Companies need help analysing and extracting value from this vast amount of information, as Big Data solutions are difficult to deploy and harder to maintain,” said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. “With Rackspace’s Managed and Cloud Big Data Platform offerings, we’re providing an open, hybrid Big Data solution for dedicated and cloud instances. Combining this technological expertise with enhanced support from Hortonworks allows us to bring a best-in-class Big Data solution to market.”

Rackspace Managed Big Data offering provides an optimised Big Data platform powered by Apache Hadoop that is aimed at reducing operational burden, while providing open source application integration. Specific benefits include:
• Design an optimal Big Data configuration: Offers customised configurations to address specific data processing requirements such as high compute, high storage, and balanced workloads. Multiple supported storage devices, reference architectures and flexible network design allow customers to design environments for their specific use case.
• Reduces Operational Burden: Reduces the amount of time required to deploy and maintain data processing environments. This solution allows customers to leverage Fanatical Support® and the deep expertise of Rackspace and Hortonworks to help with patching, cluster management, job execution and standard maintenance.
• Integrates with Custom Applications: Allows customers to leverage the full range of tools in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem to integrate with business intelligence or data applications with no additional re-tooling.
With the managed service offering, customers are able to deploy a fully featured and supported Hadoop-powered infrastructure through a single vendor contract, while leveraging a service level guarantee from Rackspace to support and maintain the environment.

"We are excited to be working with Rackspace to bring the Hortonworks Data Platform to the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud," said John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing, Hortonworks. "By combining the open source commitments of Rackspace and Hortonworks, we are creating a platform of capabilities that accelerates the adoption of open standards, while continuing to deliver expertise to the broader Hadoop community."

The Rackspace Cloud Big Data Platform features an industry leading platform powered by Apache Hadoop distribution that customers can deploy and scale rapidly in the cloud with simple pricing and no upfront investment. This provides an open service model powered by Apache Hadoop that will help foster a large ecosystem of application vendors. The solution offers:
• Rapid Deployment/Low Operational Burden – Enables customers to provision a fully featured environment powered by Apache Hadoop and scale it elastically in minutes.
• Simple Pricing and Cost Effective Infrastructure - Offers a cost effective platform with a simple pricing model to fit a majority of Big Data workloads without any hidden costs.
• A Rich Partner Ecosystem - Delivers the first truly open cloud platform powered by Apache Hadoop, which will allow a broad ecosystem of partners and applications to integrate with no additional development.

"Using Rackspace's Cloud Big Data Platform has been transformative to our development efforts. While proprietary platforms lead users down roads littered with caveats, Cloud Big Data Platform gives us an intuitive platform to build our new suite of services,” said Shanti Subramanyam, CEO of Orzota. “With the great support of the Rackspace team, Orzota's ETL/data science platform atop Rackspace's Cloud Big Data Platform can greatly simplify deployments and help drive the use of Apache Hadoop.”

Rackspace Managed and Cloud Big Data Platform solutions are the latest additions to the company’s robust portfolio of data infrastructure offerings delivered as a service. This portfolio aims to address the performance, availability and scalability needs of modern application workloads across a rich set of application data requirements. They join Rackspace’s traditional relational database solutions, as well as NoSQL offerings serving MongoDB and Redis-based applications through the recent acquisitions of ObjectRocket™ and Exceptional Cloud Services.