Oracle has released Oracle Big Data Appliance to help customers derive maximum business value from Big Data.

The appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager, plus an open source distribution of R.

Oracle Big Data Appliance is designed to simplify implementation and management of Big Data projects, runs on Oracle Linux and also the system features Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition and Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine.

In addition, Oracle also released Oracle Big Data Connectors, a software product that helps customers easily integrate data stored in Hadoop and Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g.

Together with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle Big Data Appliance, the Oracle Big Data Connectors software delivers everything customers require to acquire, organise and to analyse Big Data within the context of all their enterprise data.

Oracle Big Data Appliance comes in a full rack configuration of 18 Oracle Sun servers with a total of:
864GB main memory; 216 CPU cores; 648TB of raw disk storage; 40GB/s InfiniBand connectivity between nodes and other Oracle engineered systems; and 10 Gb/s Ethernet data centre connectivity.

This new engineered system scales by connecting multiple racks together via an InfiniBand network, features Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and the system is also included is Cloudera Manager.

Oracle Big Data Appliance is engineered to help customers to provision a highly-available and scalable system for managing massive amounts of data; to deliver a high performance platform for organising, processing and analysing Big Data in Hadoop and using R on raw data sources; and control IT costs by pre-integrating all hardware and software components into a single Big Data solution that complements enterprise data warehouses.

Oracle Big Data Connectors software is available for use with both Oracle Big Data Appliance and other Apache Hadoop-based systems.

The Oracle Big Data Connectors includes: Oracle Loader for Hadoop which uses MapReduce processing to load data efficiently into Oracle Database 11g; Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop which enables Oracle Data Integrator to generate Hadoop MapReduce programs through an easy-to-use graphical interface; Oracle Connector R which gives R users native, high performance access to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and MapReduce programming framework; and Oracle Direct Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System (ODCH), which enables the Oracle Database SQL engine to access data seamlessly from the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Oracle Data Warehousing Technologies vice-president Cetin Ozbutun said Oracle Big Data Appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, offers an integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organise diverse data types and then analyse them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions.