MapR Releases Version 2.0, Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Brian Taylor

June 14, 2012

4 Min Read
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This week MapR Technologies, a provider of an open, enterprise-level distribution for Apache Hadoop, made two major announcements: the release of Version 2.0 of its MapR Distribution and the availability of its MapR Distribution for Hadoop as an option within the Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Elastic MapReduce service. Last week Talkin’ Cloud spoke with Jack Norris, VP of Marketing at MapR, about the news.

Version 2.0 of the MapR Distribution includes advanced monitoring, management, isolation and security for Hadoop. It enables organizations to meet the needs of multiple users, groups and applications within the same cluster, “enabling” Hadoop-as-a-Service, according to the company.

MapR 2.0 provides visibility into all cluster activities, which the MapR Control System (MCS) displays in numerous views ranging from interactive historgrams to time charts. Administrators can thus filter, aggregate and drill-down on individual tasks. MapR 2.0 provides job management capabilities, enabling an administrator to control the operation of a cluster, jobs and tasks. Placement control enables data and job execution to be isolated in different areas of a cluster for performance and security enhancement or cost control. In addition, MapR now provides end-to-end visibility and control of hardware, software, storage and other parts of the MapR Distribution.

In discussing MapR Version 2.0, Norris said:

“There are three big themes within this (announcement). One is tenancy, one is security, and one is end-to-end management. And it’s all about providing this visibility, monitoring and isolation for Hadoop. And if you look at a physical cluster, the ability to slice up a physical cluster, and provide different data protection, policies, different access, different administration … there’s a big benefit to whether it’s running in the cloud as a service or whether it’s on-premise, and we find (version 2.0) services the needs throughout a single organization. It’s all about getting more visibility, more control and more statistics about what’s going on in a Hadoop cluster and meeting the needs of multiple users, groups and applications running on a single physical cluster.”

What are the major differences between the 1.0 release and Version 2.0 of MapR?

“If I were to summarize what we’ve done it’s really about enabling Hadoop-as-a-Service. And we think the cloud is absolutely a requirement as part of your Hadoop strategy. The rate of data growth, given some of the limitations, I think that a cloud strategy as part of Hadoop is key. And whether you’re doing it in the cloud or not, this Hadoop-as-a-Service and being able to logically divide up a cluster is really important given the immensity of use cases and applications. And so being able to isolate job execution and data placement and access is an absolute, critical capability.”

MapR also made available its MapR Distribution for Hadoop as an option within the Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) service, enabling users to provision scalable MapR clusters to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility of AWS. Amazon, in addition, made its own Hadoop upgrades available to MapR customers, opening up services including Amazon S3, DynamoDB and CloudWatch.

Customers can select either the MapR M3 or M5 editions when deploying an Amazon EMR cluster in the AWS Management Console, EMR API or command line client. The M3 edition is available at no additional charge over standard Amazon EMR costs, while the M5 edition adds an extra cost per hour.

Describing the benefits that MapR brings to AWS customers, Norris noted:

“The benefits that MapR provides to Amazon customers are high availability, your services will continue to be available, data protection, inter-cluster mirroring, so you can mirror across availability zones within Amazon to provide that high availability and continuity, as well as between on-premise and cloud deployments. So, Amazon can be target for our on-premise customers (Another benefit is) easy administration, so all of the job management and health information is now integrated into the Amazon management console as well. And then, high performance—we provide additional performance benefits for Amazon. We are very excited about this excellent partnership and we think customers are going to be very pleased.”

The Version 2.0 beta for the M3 and M5 editions of the MapR Distribution can be downloaded here.

Talkin’ Cloud readers can click here for an overview on the MapR partner program.

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