You’ve heard about the Dell | Cloudera Solution that provides a validated and supported Apache Hadoop solution. You’ve also heard about Crowbar, the Dell-developed open source software framework designed to deploy, configure, and manage emerging technologies like Hadoop and OpenStack. Well, we’re raising the bar again.

The Cloud and Big Data Solutions team is now contributing six new Crowbar barclamps (code modules in Crowbar that perform specific functions like update BIOS) to the Apache Hadoop open source community, making it even easier to configure and deploy Hadoop clusters.

It’s all part of an effort to help build the ecosystem around the Crowbar software framework, as part of Dell’s active investment in the Hadoop open source community.

Apache Hadoop is designed to manage and analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to solve complex problems and help make more informed decisions faster. Hadoop provides incredible scalability, lower operational overhead, and the ability to handle a much wider variety of data types than traditional databases. It is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for new Web application deployment, and has a rapidly growing ecosystem of tools and support to make it easier to use.

So how does Dell’s Crowbar software framework help?

Crowbar barclamps reach from the lowest system levels (IPMI, BIOS, and RAID) to the highest (like OpenStack and Hadoop), then deploy and configure these components in an automated fashion. These new Crowbar barclamps speed and ease the deployment, configuration and operations of the following Hadoop projects:

  • Cloudera CDH / Enterprise enables Hadoop administrators to first deploy CDH then easily move to Cloudera Enterprise if/when the business needs warrant.
  • Zookeeper allows Apache Hadoop administrators to track and coordinate distributed applications.
  • Apache Pig provides a compiler that produces sequences of Map-Reduce programs.
  • Hbase is the Hadoop database that provides real-time read/write access to a customer’s big data.
  • Flume provides an agent for collecting data and putting into the Hadoop environment.
  • Sqoop allows rapid connection to external data sources including relational databases. E.g., data can be moved from Oracle to Hadoop and back again for different types of analysis.

Dell has made this code freely available for download at www.Github.com/DellCloudEdge/Crowbar. Take advantage of the work Dell’s Hadoop experts have already done in Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, which includes Apache Hadoop reference architectures, Crowbar software, deployment guides, white papers, and more.

And with this new open sourced Crowbar functionality to ease and speed Hadoop cluster deployment, now is a great time to get started!

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