Rackspace brings ETL to the Cloud with Pentaho

A Hadoop Summit Q&A

June 27, 2013, San Jose, CA (Hadoop Summit) — This week Pentaho has been meeting with the movers and shakers of the Apache Hadoop community in San Jose, at the 6th annual Hadoop Summit. Pentaho and Rackspace are drawing attention on this final day of the show with the announcement of a partnership that brings ETL to the cloud. We’re introducing Rackspace Big Data, a powerful enterprise grade Hadoop as a Service solution. As the industry leader in cost effective data integration for Hadoop, Pentaho is proud to team with Rackspace, the industry leader in enterprise IAAS, to deliver this new era of big data in the cloud.

To learn more about the news, we’re talking today with Pentaho’s Eddie White, executive vice president of business development.

Give us a quick overview of this Rackspace news, and how Pentaho is involved.
Rackspace Big Data is an exciting Hadoop as a Service offering with full enterprise features. This is the next evolution in the big data ecosystem, delivering the ongoing structure to allow enterprise customers to choose a variety of consumption models over time. Customers can choose managed dedicated servers, and public, private or hybrid cloud options. Pentaho was chosen as the only Hadoop ETL / Data integration partner for this Cloud Tools Hadoop offering.

So is this a solution for enterprise customers looking to grow their big data operations?
Yes, absolutely. Hadoop as a Service is an attractive alternative for customers that need enterprise-level infrastructure support. Pentaho gives Rackspace a partner with the skills and talent on-board to deliver big data for production environments, along with the support and stability that Rackspace customers demand from their service-level agreements. Enterprises are looking for a Cloud partner with an enterprise-grade infrastructure to support running their business; not just test and development efforts.

What makes up this Hadoop as a Service model?
Together, Rackspace, Hortonworks and Pentaho have jointly delivered an offering that facilitates ease of use and ease of adoption of Hadoop as a Service. Rackspace Big Data includes the HortonWorks Data Platform for Hadoop; Pentaho Business Analytics as the ETL / Big Data Integration partner; and Karmasphere providing Hadoop analytics.

Rackspace excels at the enterprise IaaS model, and now they’ve partnered with Hortonworks and Pentaho to introduce an easy-to-use, consume-as-you-scale Hadoop as a Service offering – so customers can get started today, confident their solution will scale along with their big data needs. Rackspace chose to partner with Pentaho because it is the industry-leading Hadoop ETL and Big Data Analytics platform. Rackspace Big Data offers a range of models to meet any organization’s changing needs, from dedicated to hybrid, and for private and public clouds. And the offering ensures the ability to bi-directionally move data in and out of enterprise clusters, with minimal technical effort and cost.

What does Pentaho Data Integration bring to Rackspace Big Data?
Rather than speak for our partner, I’ll let Sean Anderson, Rackspace Hosting’s product marketing manager for cloud big data solutions, answer that. He sums up what Pentaho brings to the partnership nicely:

“Pentaho Data Integration is all about easing adoption and enhancing utilization of Rackspace big data platforms, with native, easy-to-use data integration. Pentaho is leading the innovation of Hadoop Integration and Analytics, and the upcoming cloud offering with Rackspace reduces the barriers to instant success with Hadoop, so customers can adopt and deploy quickly, delivering faster ROI,” said Anderson.

“Pentaho’s powerful data integration engine serves as a platform, enabling delivery of that content right into an enterprise’s pre-existing business intelligence and analytics tools,” continued Anderson. “Rackspace Big Data customers who require multiple data stores can leverage the ease of operation inherent in their visual ETL tool Pentaho provides. Customers will be able to complement their platform offering by adding the validated Pentaho tool via the Cloud Tools Marketplace.”

A key takeaway is that Rackspace Big Data customers may choose to bridge to the Pentaho Business Analytics platform. As an example, Pentaho’s full suite can be used where a Rackspace customer wants to use both Hortonworks and ObjectRocket. We bring the data in both of these databases to life for the Rackspace customer.

Why is Pentaho excited about this announcement?
This is exciting news because it is Pentaho’s first strategic cloud partnership. As the big data market has matured, it’s now time for production workloads to be moved over to Big Data Service offerings. Rackspace is the recognized leader providing the enterprise with IaaS, with an enterprise-grade support model. We see Rackspace and a natural partner for us to make our move into this space. We are market leaders in our respective categories with proven experience that enterprises trust for service, reliability, scalability and support. As the market for Hadoop and Big Data is developing and maturing, we see Rackspace as the natural strategic partner for Pentaho to begin providing Big Data / Hadoop as a Service.

How can organizations buy Rackspace Big Data?
For anyone looking to leverage Hadoop as a Service, Rackspace Big Data is available directly from Rackspace. For more information and pricing visit: www.rackspace.com/big-data. Pentaho will also be in the Rackspace Cloud Tools marketplace.

About Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company
Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company, is a leading data integration and business analytics company with an enterprise-class, open source-based platform for diverse big data deployments. Pentaho’s unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment. Pentaho’s mission is to help organizations across multiple industries harness the value from all their data, including big data and IoT, enabling them to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk. Pentaho has over 15,000 product deployments and 1,500 commercial customers today including ABN-AMRO Clearing, BT, EMC, NASDAQ and Sears Holdings Corporation. For more information visit www.pentaho.com.