Maybe I am being overly sensitive but I don’t see a problem with:
…a phalanx of admins to oversee … a [Hadoop] operation
I mean, that why they have software/hardware is to provide places for admins to gather and play. Right? 😉
Or NOT!
Maybe Ian Armas Foster in Mortar Takes Aim at Hadoop Usability has some good points:
“Have a pile of under-utilized data? Want to use Hadoop but can’t spend weeks or months getting started?” According to fresh startup Mortar, these are questions that should appeal to potential Hadoop users, who are looking to wrap their arms around the elephant without hiring a phalanx of admins to oversee the operation.
Mortar claims to make Hadoop more accessible to the people most responsible for garnering insight from big data: data scientists and engineers. The young startup took flight when a couple of architects at Wireless Generation decided that big data tools and approaches were complex enough to warrant a new breed of offering–one that could take the hardware element out of Hadoop use.
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Hadoop is a terrific open-source data tool that can process and perform analytics (sometimes predictive) on big data and large datasets. An unfortunate property of Hadoop is its difficult utility. Many companies looking to get into big data simply invest in Hadoop clusters without a vision as to how to use the cluster or without the resources, human on monetary, to execute said vision.
“Hadoop is an amazing technology but for most companies it was out of reach,” said Young in a presentation at the New York City Data Business Meetup in September.
To combat this, Mortar is building a web based product-as-a-service in which someone need simply need log on to the Mortar website and then they can start writing the code allowing their pile of data to do what it wants. “We wanted to make operation very easy,” said Young “because it’s very hard to hire people with Hadoop expertise and because Hadoop is sort of famously hard to operate.”
A bit further in the article, it is claimed that a “data scientist” can be up and using Hadoop in one (1) hour.
Can you name another technology that is “…famously hard to operate?”
Do data integration, semantics, semantic web, RDF, master data management, topic maps come to mind?
If they do, what do you think can be done to make them easier to operate?
Having a hard to operate approach, technology or tool may be thrilling, in a “girls keep out” clubhouse sort of way, but it isn’t the road to success, commercial or otherwise.