(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Cloudera (www.cloudera.com), which offers enterprise-level support to users of Apache Hadoop, has confirmed 12 sponsors for its inaugural Hadoop World conference in less than two weeks in New York City.
Hadoop World will take place Friday, October 2 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, where more than 30 of the world’s most experienced Apache Hadoop practitioners, including project creator Doug Cutting, will gather to discuss Hadoop-related best practices and use cases.
According to Cloudera’s Tuesday announcement, the 12 confirmed sponsors for Hadoop World: NYC 2009 are Facebook, Rackspace, Yahoo!, Intel, IBM, Amazon.com, Supermicro, Softlayer, and eHarmony. Confirmed media sponsors include GigaOm, High Scalability, ReadWriteWeb, and The Register.
An open-source implementation of frameworks for data-intensive distributed computing and reliable data storage, Apache Hadoop was famously used by The New York Times to process 4TB of raw images stored on Amazon’s S3 cloud into 11 million finished PDFs in the space of 24 hours for only about $240 in computation costs.
“To have such a large number of industry leaders sponsor a first-time event speaks volumes about the importance of Hadoop and its future,” Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia said in a statement. “As traditional enterprises around the world are turning to Hadoop to solve data-intensive computing challenges, Hadoop World will provide compelling use cases along with the introduction and instruction needed for enterprise users to get started.”
On February 19, 2008, Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) launched the Yahoo! Search Webmap, which could be the world’s largest Hadoop production application, running on a more than 10,000 core Linux cluster and producing data that is now used in every Yahoo! Web search query. “We are excited about the growth we’re seeing in the Hadoop ecosystem, including more uses of Hadoop for mission critical activity across the industry,” Yahoo! Hadoop software development vice president Eric Baldeschwieler said in a statement. “At Hadoop World, we look forward to discussing the exciting prospects and challenges for continuing to make Hadoop faster, more scalable, more reliable and more secure.”
IBM (www.ibm.com) software group emerging technologies vice president Rod Smith said that Hadoop-based applications have the potential to revolutionize business analytics just as PC spreadsheets did in the 80s. “Using Hadoop to tap the power of ‘Big Data’ sets the stage for a new class of web applications — enabling more business professionals across industries to gain insight from today’s massive amount of information,” Smith said in a statement.
Rackspace (www.rackspace.com) chief technology officer John Engates said Hadoop has helped handle its many terabytes of log files and event level data generated from its cloud services. “Hadoop has proven to be a scalable and reliable system for storing and processing our ever increasing volumes of data, and we’re excited to share details with the community at Hadoop World: NYC 2009,” Engates said in a statement.
Many customers of on-demand data center and hosting services provider Softlayer (www.softlayer.com) have been using its bare metal cloud offering to optimize Hadoop performance, according to Softlayer CTO Nathan Day. “We see a lot of our customers taking advantage of,” Day stated. “It’s exciting to see how many companies are turning to Hadoop and we’re pleased to be a part of this growing community.”
