VMware's Project Serengeti to virtualise Hadoop

manage and scale Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments, eWeek writes.

In addition, VMware revealed enhancements to Spring for Apache Hadoop as well as integrations with vSphere and Apache Hadoop to deploy a highly available Hadoop platform.

VMware is working with the Hadoop community to contribute extensions that will make key components “virtualisation-aware” to support elastic scaling and further improve Hadoop performance in virtual environments.

Hadoop, which is an open source software framework for managing massive volumes of unstructured data, is used by some of the top IT shops in the world, such as Yahoo and Facebook, but is still in its early stages of adoption across most mid-sized to large enterprises, CIO.IN writes.

Experts say VMware's announcement, along with other Hadoop-related news this week, further legitimises the Hadoop market and could spur more companies to begin exploring the potential value of big data analytics.

With Project Serengeti, VMware has optimised Hadoop to run on virtualised infrastructure, compared to physical servers, which do not run a hypervisor.

For the most part, Information Week notes, Hadoop requires a dedicated server cluster to do its work, and that's an expensive proposition in most working IT shops.

If it could run in a virtualised environment on virtual servers, it could be activated and deactivated more easily, says Fausto Ibarra, senior director of product management at VMware.