EMC boosts Hadoop with Pivotal HD rollout

EMC has introduced a push to integrate its Greenplum products with Hadoop databases in a next-generation big data platform.

The company said that the effort, dubbed Pivotal HD, would deliver a 10 times performance gain over current Hadoop distributions.

The platform will combine Hadoop unstructured database tools with Greenplum massive parallel processing (MPP.) That system, dubbed Hawq, will be based on the Hadoop distributed files system (HDFS) and will seek to expand the performance ceiling in big data systems.

Scott Yara, Greenplum co-founder and vice president of products, said that the Hawq platform was an effort to put to use years of smaller projects Greenplum has been working on.

"What we thought is: what would be possible if we put together all this deep technology that we have developed over the past years?" he said.

The project is part of a Pivotal HD system which the company hopes will be the most powerful Hadoop distribution ever. The company said that in some cases, Pivotal HD performs up to 100 times better than current-generation Hadoop big data systems.

Pivotal HD will serve as the basis for a larger effort by Greenplum and its parent company EMC in the big data sector. EMC has in the past sought to establish itself among the leading firms in the development of new big data platforms and initiatives.

Yara said that the company hopes its efforts will help to build big data tools which can carry through the next decade.

"It is about a once-in-a-generation change in entire data fabrics," Yara said.

"It is the foundation for the next 10 years of computing in and around the data industry."