Oracle updates Big Data Appliance with latest Intel Xeon processors

Oracle has updated its Big Data Appliance to include Intel's new processors and the latest release of Apache Hadoop.

The inclusion of the latest eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 series of processors means Oracle's appliance now has 33 percent more processing power and memory per node.

The appliance also offers a 30 percent reduction in the power and cooling it requires, compared to the previous generation, the firm claimed.

Now optimised for big data analytics platform Hadoop, Oracle's Big Data Appliance includes the latest edition of Cloudera software, used to manage Hadoop environments.

"An influx of raw datasets is flooding every enterprise. However, before businesses can take advantage of the potential opportunity, they face a significant challenge in organising these diverse data sources," said Cetin Ozbutun, vice president, data warehousing and big data technologies at Oracle.

"The latest updates further improve the abilities of our customers to optimise big data workloads and integrate them with their data warehouses to easily analyse all data throughout the enterprise."

In addition, Oracle announced updates to its Big Data Connectors, a software product that helps customers integrate data stored in Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g.

These connectors have been enhanced to enable greater SQL access to Hadoop from Oracle Database and to enable more transparent access to Hadoop from R.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance was first launched in January and includes an open source distribution of R, used for predictive analytics and statistical modelling.

The moves should help Oracle further compete with its rivals in the market place, according to market analysts.

"This is an incremental update that makes the appliance more Hadoop friendly, and steps up Oracle's competition with the other big data player, like EMC, Teradata and IBM," MWD Advisors analyst Helena Schwenk told V3.