MapR is extending its support for SAS for the goal of Big Data storage independence.
The extended support means that joint customers will be able to experience comprehensive interoperability between SAS technologies and MapR Distribution, including Hadoop.
The collaboration will provide advanced analytics with data preparation, integration with legacy systems, assurance of SLAs, and security and data governance compliance.
Additionally, joint customers will be able to grow their Big Data storage infrastructure without relying on storage area network or network-attached storage.
MapR, which is a provider of distributions of Apache Hadoop, provides a data store that removes the need for joing customers to use SAN or NAS for expansion. The goal is clearly to expand the amount of people deploying Hadoop environments for Big Data.
By extending the support to SAS, the company increases the appeal of Hadoop by making interoperability with the analytics giant much simpler.
CBR spoke to Rob Anderson, VP systems engineering at MapR about the market maturity of Hadoop and Big Data.
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Anderson said: "I believe it is the time now for business to be looking into, I think the skills gap is still fairly large. Having said that, the distributions have made a lot of efforts to make Hadoop a lot easier to install, manage and deploy.
"I think at this stage it’s easy enough that with a little bit of guidance an FTSE 100 company would not have any challenge in starting up a small system and starting to experiment."
The company deals with number of unusual use cases according to Anderson, who said: "Sometimes there is simply no replacement for having a full blown addition to SAS, where you’re sitting down and pouring over numbers however they might be laid out.
"SAS is the most successful analytics company there has ever been, they have thousands of customers, we serve many of those and that remains a very popular option."
The collaboration between the two companies will make available the full scope of technologies in the SAS portfolio. This includes LASR Analytic Server, Visual Analytics, High-Performance Analytics, Data Loader for Hadoop.
In addition to these the MapR integration delivers full POSIX compliance for use in "share everything architectures," as well as enabling SAS Visual Analytics to access all data.
