Hadoop May be Brought to OpenStack Clouds by Project Savanna
Hadoop May be Brought to OpenStack Clouds by Project Savanna by UCStrategies Staff
Mirantis is an OpenStack integrator which has been key in the formation of Project Savanna, an open-source project which tried to make Apache Hadoop run on OpenStack clouds and give organizations something different to the cloud-based Hadoop service provided by Amazon.
It was at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon, that Project Savanna was launched; it has a structure which links the management tools of Hadoop with the infrastructure from OpenStack. A framework is being developed by Mirantis and it is also becoming partners with both Red Hat, in order to achieve a basic infrastructure, and Hortonworks, so that it can make use of the Hadoop features.
The project aims to create open-source APIs which will mean that Hadoop workloads can be transferred between public and private clouds, and Mirantis, as the leader of Project Savanna, will make sure that the targets are met.
The CEO of Mirantis, Adrian Ionel, said: “We're providing the hardware and software development expertise, and our role going forward will be to drive the road map. We will incorporate ideas from Red Hat and Hortonworks, but we intend to be the leader for the project.”
Hadoop is utilized by a variety of organizations in the cloud today, and Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR) works alongside Amazon EC2 and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). However, as Amazon’s APIs are proprietary, it is not possible to migrate projects which start out on EMR in-house to a private cloud, unless there is extra developmental work. This is a problem that will be reviewed by Project Savanna.
Ionel stated: “We see a need for customers to have a unified computing infrastructure using open source, as opposed to Hadoop islands and OpenStack islands.”
The senior director of storage strategy at Red Hat, Greg Kleiman, has said that Amazon EMR benefits Hadoop pilot projects, but can be restrictively over-priced in terms of operating production services at scale. He said: “We have a lot of big data customers that use the cloud today for Hadoop. They want a more open approach, but they don't want to lose that cost effectiveness or ease of use.”
According to Ionel, the Project Savanna idea was developed as a result of Mirantis’ work in creating large-scale production platforms to aid its customers. Around 320 engineers are working on building OpenStack cloud platforms for Mirantis, and PayPal, Gap, NASA, Dell and Hewlett-Packard are some of their customers.
Hadoop is an open-source big data platform used for creating and distributing data-intensive applications, and some vendors are also investigating into the ways that Hadoop can be brought to the cloud. Serengeti, an open-source project which comes with a free deployment toolkit for distributing a Hadoop cluster on vSphere by VMware, was unveiled in June 2012. (CY) Link