Basho and Riak
Basho was on my (very short) blacklist of companies with whom I refuse to speak, because they have lied about the contents of previous conversations. But Tony Falco et al. are long gone from the company. So when Basho’s new management team reached out, I took the meeting.
For starters:
- Basho management turned over significantly 1-2 years ago. The main survivors from the old team are 1 each in engineering, sales, and services.
- Basho moved its headquarters to Bellevue, WA. (You get one guess as to where the new CEO lives.) Engineering operations are very distributed geographically.
- Basho claims that it is much better at timely product shipments than it used to be. Its newest product has a planned (or at least hoped-for) 8-week cadence for point releases.
- Basho’s revenue is ~90% subscription.
- Basho claims >200 enterprise clients, vs. 100-120 when new management came in. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask the usual questions about divisions vs. whole organizations, OEM sell-through vs. direct, etc.
- Basho claims an average contract value of >$100K, typically over 2-3 years. $9 million of that (which would be close to half the total, actually), comes from 2 particular deals of >$4 million each.
Basho’s product line has gotten a bit confusing, but as best I understand things the story is:
- There’s something called Riak Core, which isn’t even a revenue-generating product. However, it’s an open source project with some big users (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Visa), and included in pretty much everything else Basho promotes.
- Riak KV is the key-value store previously known as Riak. It generates the lion’s share of Basho’s revenue.
- Riak S2 is an emulation of Amazon S3. Basho thinks that Riak KV loses efficiency when objects get bigger than 1 MB or so, and that’s when you might want to use Riak S2 in addition or instead.
- Riak TS is for time series, and just coming out now.
- Also in the mix are some (extra charge) connectors for Redis and Spark. Presumably, there are more of these to come.
- There’s an umbrella marketing term of “Basho Data Platform”.
Technical notes on some of that include: Read more
Hadoop generalities
Occasionally I talk with an astute reporter — there are still a few left 🙂 — and get led toward angles I hadn’t considered before, or at least hadn’t written up. A blog post may then ensue. This is one such post.
There is a group of questions going around that includes:
- Is Hadoop overhyped?
- Has Hadoop adoption stalled?
- Is Hadoop adoption being delayed by skills shortages?
- What is Hadoop really good for anyway?
- Which adoption curves for previous technologies are the best analogies for Hadoop?
To a first approximation, my responses are: Read more
Hadoop: And then there were three
Hortonworks, IBM, EMC Pivotal and others have announced a project called “Open Data Platform” to do … well, I’m not exactly sure what. Mainly, it sounds like:
- An attempt to minimize the importance of any technical advantages Cloudera or MapR might have.
- A face-saving way to admit that IBM’s and Pivotal’s insistence on having their own Hadoop distributions has been silly.
- An excuse for press releases.
- A source of an extra logo graphic to put on marketing slides.
Edit: Now there’s a press report saying explicitly that Hortonworks is taking over Pivotal’s Hadoop distro customers (which basically would mean taking over the support contracts and then working to migrate them to Hortonworks’ distro).
The claim is being made that this announcement solves some kind of problem about developing to multiple versions of the Hadoop platform, but to my knowledge that’s a problem rarely encountered in real life. When you already have a multi-enterprise open source community agreeing on APIs (Application Programming interfaces), what API inconsistency remains for a vendor consortium to painstakingly resolve?
Anyhow, it now seems clear that if you want to use a Hadoop distribution, there are three main choices:
- Cloudera’s flavor, whether as software (from Cloudera) or in an appliance (e.g. from Oracle).
- MapR’s flavor, as software from MapR.
- Hortonworks’ flavor, from a number of vendors, including Hortonworks, IBM, Pivotal, Teradata et al.
In saying that, I’m glossing over a few points, such as: Read more
| Categories: Amazon and its cloud, Cloudera, EMC, Emulation, transparency, portability, Greenplum, Hadoop, Hortonworks, IBM and DB2, MapR, Open source | 11 Comments |
A few numbers from MapR
MapR put out a press release aggregating some customer information; unfortunately, the release is a monument to vagueness. Let me start by saying:
- I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing Derrick Harris was incorrect in suspecting that this release was a reaction to my recent post about Hortonworks’ numbers. For one thing, press releases usually don’t happen that quickly.
- And as should be obvious from the previous point — notwithstanding that MapR is a client, I had no direct involvement in this release.
- In general, I advise clients and other vendors to put out the kind of aggregate of customer success stories found in this release. However, I would like to see more substance than MapR offered.
Anyhow, the key statement in the MapR release is:
… the number of companies that have a paid subscription for MapR now exceeds 700.
Unfortunately, that includes OEM customers as well as direct ones; I imagine MapR’s direct customer count is much lower.
In one gesture to numerical conservatism, MapR did indicate by email that it counts by overall customer organization, not by department/cluster/contract (i.e., not the way Hortonworks does). Read more
| Categories: Hadoop, Health care, MapR, Market share and customer counts, Pricing, Telecommunications | 3 Comments |
An idealized log management and analysis system — from whom?
I’ve talked with many companies recently that believe they are:
- Focused on building a great data management and analytic stack for log management …
- … unlike all the other companies that might be saying the same thing 🙂 …
- … and certainly unlike expensive, poorly-scalable Splunk …
- … and also unlike less-focused vendors of analytic RDBMS (which are also expensive) and/or Hadoop distributions.
At best, I think such competitive claims are overwrought. Still, it’s a genuinely important subject and opportunity, so let’s consider what a great log management and analysis system might look like.
Much of this discussion could apply to machine-generated data in general. But right now I think more players are doing product management with an explicit conception either of log management or event-series analytics, so for this post I’ll share that focus too.
A short answer might be “Splunk, but with more analytic functionality and more scalable performance, at lower cost, plus numerous coupons for free pizza.” A more constructive and bottoms-up approach might start with: Read more
Notes and comments, May 6, 2014
After visiting California recently, I made a flurry of posts, several of which generated considerable discussion.
- My claim that Spark will replace Hadoop MapReduce got much Twitter attention — including some high-profile endorsements — and also some responses here.
- My MemSQL post led to a vigorous comparison of MemSQL vs. VoltDB.
- My post on hardware and storage spawned a lively discussion of Hadoop hardware pricing; even Cloudera wound up disagreeing with what I reported Cloudera as having said. 🙂 Sadly, there was less response to the part about the partial (!) end of Moore’s Law.
- My Cloudera/SQL/Impala/Hive apparently was well-balanced, in that it got attacked from multiple sides via Twitter & email. Apparently, I was too hard on Impala, I was too hard on Hive, and I was too hard on boxes full of cardboard file cards as well.
- My post on the Intel/Cloudera deal garnered a comment reminding us Dell had pushed the Intel distro.
- My CitusDB post picked up a few clarifying comments.
Here is a catch-all post to complete the set. Read more
Spark on fire
Spark is on the rise, to an even greater degree than I thought last month.
- Numerous clients and other companies I talk with have adopted Spark, plan to adopt Spark, or at least think it’s likely they will. In particular:
- A number of analytic-stack companies are joining ClearStory in using Spark. Most of the specifics are confidential, but I hope some will be announced soon.
- MapR has joined Cloudera in supporting Spark, and indeed — unlike Cloudera — is supporting the full Spark stack.
- Mike Olson of Cloudera is on record as predicting that Spark will be the replacement for Hadoop MapReduce. Just about everybody seems to agree, except perhaps for Hortonworks folks betting on the more limited and less mature Tez. Spark’s biggest technical advantages as a general data processing engine are probably:
- The Directed Acyclic Graph processing model. (Any serious MapReduce-replacement contender will probably echo that aspect.)
- A rich set of programming primitives in connection with that model.
- Support also for highly-iterative processing, of the kind found in machine learning.
- Flexible in-memory data structures, namely the RDDs (Resilient Distributed Datasets).
- A clever approach to fault-tolerance.
- Spark is a major contender in streaming.
- There’s some cool machine-learning innovation using Spark.
- Spark 1.0 will drop by mid-May, Apache voters willin’ an’ the creek don’ rise. Publicity will likely ensue, with strong evidence of industry support.*
*Yes, my fingerprints are showing again.
The most official description of what Spark now contains is probably the “Spark ecosystem” diagram from Databricks. However, at the time of this writing it is slightly out of date, as per some email from Databricks CEO Ion Stoica (quoted with permission):
… but if I were to redraw it, SparkSQL will replace Shark, and Shark will eventually become a thin layer above SparkSQL and below BlinkDB.
With this change, all the modules on top of Spark (i.e., SparkStreaming, SparkSQL, GraphX, and MLlib) are part of the Spark distribution. You can think of these modules as libraries that come with Spark.
Curt Monash on video
I made a remarkably rumpled video appearance yesterday with SiliconAngle honchos John Furrier and Dave Vellante. (Excuses include <3 hours sleep, and then a scrambling reaction to a schedule change.) Topics covered included, with approximate timechecks:
- 0:00 Introductory pabulum, and some technical difficulties
- 2:00 More introduction
- 3:00 Dynamic schemas and data model churn
- 6:00 Surveillance and privacy
- 13:00 Hadoop, especially the distro wars
- 22:00 BI innovation
- 23:30 More on dynamic schemas and data model churn
Edit: Some of my remarks were transcribed.
Related links
- I posted on dynamic schemas data model churn a few days ago.
- I capped off a series on privacy and surveillance a few days ago.
- I commented on various Hadoop distributions in June.
| Categories: Business intelligence, ClearStory Data, Data warehousing, Hadoop, MapR, MapReduce, Surveillance and privacy | Leave a Comment |
Hortonworks, Hadoop, Stinger and Hive
I chatted yesterday with the Hortonworks gang. The main subject was Hortonworks’ approach to SQL-on-Hadoop — commonly called Stinger — but at my request we cycled through a bunch of other topics as well. Company-specific notes include:
- Hortonworks founder J. Eric “Eric14” Baldeschwieler is no longer at Hortonworks, although I imagine he stays closely in touch. What he’s doing next is unspecified, except by the general phrase “his own thing”. (Derrick Harris has more on Eric’s departure.)
- John Kreisa still is at Hortonworks, just not as marketing VP. Think instead of partnerships and projects.
- ~250 employees.
- ~70-75 subscription customers.
Our deployment and use case discussions were a little confused, because a key part of Hortonworks’ strategy is to support and encourage the idea of combining use cases and workloads on a single cluster. But I did hear:
- 10ish nodes for a typical starting cluster.
- 100ish nodes for a typical “data lake” committed adoption.
- Teradata UDA (Unified Data Architecture)* customers sometimes (typically?) jumping straight to a data lake scenario.
- A few users in the 10s of 1000s of nodes. (Obviously Yahoo is one.)
- HBase used in >50% of installations.
- Hive probably even more than that.
- Hortonworks is seeing a fair amount of interest in Windows Hadoop deployments.
*By the way — Teradata seems serious about pushing the UDA as a core message.
Ecosystem notes, in Hortonworks’ perception, included:
- Cloudera is obviously Hortonworks’ biggest distro competitor. Next is IBM, presumably in its blue-forever installed base. MapR is barely on the radar screen; Pivotal’s likely rise hasn’t yet hit sales reports.
- Hortonworks evidently sees a lot of MicroStrategy and Tableau, and some Platfora and Datameer, the latter two at around the same level of interest.
- Accumulo is a big deal in the Federal government, and has gotten a few health care wins as well. Its success is all about security. (Note: That’s all consistent with what I hear elsewhere.)
I also asked specifically about OpenStack. Hortonworks is a member of the OpenStack project, contributes nontrivially to Swift and other subprojects, and sees Rackspace as an important partner. But despite all that, I think strong Hadoop/OpenStack integration is something for the indefinite future.
Hortonworks’ views about Hadoop 2.0 start from the premise that its goal is to support running a multitude of workloads on a single cluster. (See, for example, what I previously posted about Tez and YARN.) Timing notes for Hadoop 2.0 include:
- It’s been in preview/release candidate/commercial beta mode for weeks.
- Q3 is the goal; H2 is the emphatic goal.
- Yahoo’s been in production with YARN >8 months, and has no MapReduce 1 clusters left. (Yahoo has >35,000 Hadoop nodes.)
- The last months of delays have been mainly about sprucing up various APIs and protocols, which may need to serve for a similar multi-year period as Hadoop 1’s have. But there also was some YARN stabilization into May.
Frankly, I think Cloudera’s earlier and necessarily incremental Hadoop 2 rollout was a better choice than Hortonworks’ later big bang, even though the core-mission aspect of Hadoop 2.0 is what was least ready. HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) performance, NameNode failover and so on were well worth having, and it’s more than a year between Cloudera starting supporting them and when Hortonworks is offering Hadoop 2.0.
Hortonworks’ approach to doing SQL-on-Hadoop can be summarized simply as “Make Hive into as good an analytic RDBMS as possible, all in open source”. Key elements include: Read more
Hadoop news and rumors, June 23, 2013
Cloudera
- Cloudera changed CEOs last week. Tom Reilly, late of ArcSight, is the new guy (I don’t know him), while Mike Olson’s titles become Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. Mike told me Friday that Reilly had secretly been working with him for months.
- Mike shared good-sounding numbers with me. But little is for public disclosure except the stat >400 employees.
- There are always rumors of infighting at Cloudera, perhaps because from earliest days Cloudera was a place where tempers are worn on sleeves. That said, Mike denied stories of problems between him and COO Kirk Dunn, and greatly praised Kirk’s successes at large-account sales.
- Cloudera now self-identifies pretty clearly as an analytic data management company. The vision is multiple execution engines – MapReduce, Impala, something more memory-centric, etc. – talking to any of a variety of HDFS file formats. While some formats may be optimized for specific engines – e.g. Parquet for Impala – anything can work with more or less anything.*
- Mike told me that Cloudera didn’t have any YARN users in production, but thought there would be some by year-end. Even so, he thinks it’s fair to say that Cloudera users have substantial portions of Hadoop 2 in production, for example NameNode failover and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) performance enhancements. Ditto HCatalog.
*Of course, there will always be exceptions. E.g., some formats can be updated on a short-request basis, while others can only be written to via batch conversions.
Everybody else
- There’s a widespread belief that Hortonworks is being shopped. Numerous folks – including me — believe the rumor of an Intel offer for $700 million. Higher figures and alternate buyers aren’t as widely believed.
- Views of MapR market traction, never high, are again on the downswing.
- IBM Big Insights seems to have some traction.
- In case there was any remaining doubt — DBMS vendors are pretty unanimous in agreeing that it makes sense to have Hadoop too. To my knowledge SAP hasn’t been as clear about showing a markitecture incorporating Hadoop as most of the others have … but then, SAP’s markitecture is generally less clear than other vendors’.
- Folks I talk with are generally wondering where and why Datameer lost its way. That still leaves Datameer ahead of other first-generation Hadoop add-on vendors (Karmasphere, Zettaset, et al.), in that I rarely hear them mentioned at all.
- I visited with my client Platfora. Things seem to be going very well.
- My former client Revelytix seems to have racked up some nice partnerships. (I had something to do with that. :))
| Categories: Cloudera, Data warehousing, Datameer, Hadoop, Hortonworks, IBM and DB2, Intel, MapR, Market share and customer counts, Platfora, SAP AG, Zettaset | 11 Comments |