Intel have introduced their own Hadoop distribution. So to go along with Cloudera, MapR and all the others out there there’s another one.  Is this a move away from hardware? Probably not, in my opinion but it does mark the start of larger scale integrated solutions.

Two issues that seem to be addressed: firstly a decent management console and secondly integration to more statistical based tools like R. Revolution Analytics have done a lot of work on the Hadoop/R scene so much so they have their own distro too. Cloudatics (he wrote this) wrote a workable web based front end so anyone could do Hadoop scale processing but without the technicalities.

It looks like Intel are using the Hadoop platform to upsell their server hardware, storage and the all important maintenance contracts (like IBM do).

The self contained on demand on storage is important. You don’t want to waste bandwidth transferring data between your server and a Hadoop distributed file system.  The more centralised the processing and the storage is the quicker and cheaper it will work.

Above all in the next two or three years, while some are writing Hadoop off, it’s worth keeping a very close eye on Hadoop and R working together.