To finish up this initial series on Hadoop appliances, we will first take a look at the hardware configurations and then my point of view on overall value.
I kind of like the IBM configuration, given the number of servers, total memory, data nodes, capacity and price.
But what about overall value? A lot of that is going to come down to the Hadoop distribution that is included.
IBM’s BigInsights differs from other distributions because it adds analytics and visualization tooling on top of the open source Apache Hadoop software. Specifically, that means text analytics, social media analytic toolkits, machine data analytic toolkits, BigSheets business visualization, and a rich eclipse based development environment.
And because BigInsights is from IBM, that means the entire appliance comes from IBM and is supported by IBM. While other vendors may offer level 1 support for the entire appliance, it is likely that detailed technical support for Hadoop will be passed on to the Hadoop vendor themselves in the case of Oracle, Teradata, or HP.
So here is an assessment on overall value when these things are considered.
So there we have something to start with for your evaluation of a Hadoop appliance.
IBM has the lowest acquisition price, a balanced hw configuration with lots of memory and capacity, ships with everything pre-installed and configured, single vendor support, and built-in analytics to gain insight from the data stored in Hadoop.
Sheffield View 