By Mark Davison at IBM PartnerWorld, Las Vegas – Following hot on the heels of IBM’s tie-up with VMware came the announcement that the company has also signed an agreement with Hortonworks, making Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) available for IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and its Spectrum Scale.
The agreement will lead to the certification of HDP on Power and x86 systems.
“This is a unique moment, IBM making an announcement with Open Source,” says Doug O’Flaherty, Spectrum Scale Marketing at IBM. “And it’s important for us to go out to our partners with it.”
The agreement between the two companies represents the first IBM Storage offering and industry first enterprise software defined storage solution certified for Hortonworks.
“This is about being a very open ecosystem and another step in the evolution of our ecosystem,” says O’Flaherty.
He also revealed the expected availability of the new solutions.
“We’ve announced the agreement today at PartnerWorld, then comes the concepts stage, and then we plan to ship on Power in April and x86 in May,” O’Flaherty says.
The company says that when completed, the HDP certifications will provide a significant layer of confidence to existing IBM and future clients who will now be able to run Hadoop applications on leading software-defined storage solutions.
“Every organisation is becoming a digital organisation,” says Ed Walsh, GM for IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. “With this announcement IBM is delivering a powerful platform to extend the use of data and for cognitive applications. It shows our partner community IBM’s commitment to help clients grow, develop, and transform the use of their own data with less complexity.”
Key benefits of HDP for IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and IBM Spectrum Scale include:
Better storage efficiency – unlike HDFS which creates three copies of every piece of data, IBM ESS uses erasure coding, eliminating the need for multiple copies and increasing storage efficiency.
Hybrid Storage – extends on premise storage to the cloud and therefore realises a myriad of economic, security, accessibility and other benefits.
High Performance – as an optimised, highly parallel storage solution ESS is capable of high-speed data throughput able to exceed the performance of distributed HDFS.
IBM is one of the founding partners of Open Data Platform and has helped pave the way to enable any company to join the Open Data Platform initiative (ODPi). The focus, it says, is on innovating around the Apache Hadoop open source core, growing the ecosystem and enabling solutions on a standardised Open Data Platform across the ecosystem partners.
