This has been an exciting week. Further expanding its Big Data portfolio, Cisco has announced collaboration with Intel, its long term partner, for the next generation of open platform for data management and analytics. The joint solution combines Intel? Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software with Cisco's Common Platform Architecture (CPA) to deliver performance, capacity, and security for enterprise-class Hadoop deployments.

As described in my blog posting, the CPA is highly scalable architecture designed to meet variety of scale-out application demands that includes compute, storage, connectivity and unified management, already being deployed in a range of industries including finance, retail, service provider, content management and government. Unique to this architecture is the seamless data integration and management integration capabilities between big data applications and enterprise applications such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and others, as shown below:

The current version of the CPA offers two options depending on use case: Performance optimized -offers balanced compute power with I/O bandwidth optimized for price/performance, and Capacity optimized -for low cost per terabyte. The Intel? Distribution is supported for both performance optimized and capacity optimized options, and is available in single rack and multiple rack scale.

The Intel? Distribution is a controlled distribution based on the Apache Hadoop, with feature enhancements, performance optimizations, and security options that are responsible for the solution's enterprise quality. The combination of the Intel? Distribution and Cisco UCS joins the power of big data with a dependable deployment model that can be implemented rapidly and scaled to meet performance and capacity of demanding workloads.  Enterprise-class services from Cisco and Intel can help with design, deployment, and testing, and organizations can continue to rely on these services through controlled and supported releases.

A performance optimized CPA rack running Intel? Distribution will be demonstrated at the Intel Booth at O'Reilly Strata Conference 2013 this week.

References:

1. Cisco UCS with the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop -Solution Brief
2. Cisco's Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data
3. Paul Perez and Boyd Davis on Cisco and Intel Partnership on Big Data (Video)
4. Cisco and Intel Announcement -blog by Didier Rombaut
5. Intel Guest Blog