Project Savanna to Create Bridges Between Hadoop and OpenStack

Last week was a huge one for technology platforms focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing. In conjunction with OpenStack Summit, Red Hat advanced its enterprise-scale OpenStack tools and services and took big steps toward offering complete OpenStack-centric support with its Early Adapter program and tech roadmap. And, Microsoft stepped up its competition with Amazon Web Services through its Windows Azure-related announcements.

What got a little less ink in the press, though, was Project Savanna, which aims to enable users to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters on OpenStack. It's backed by Red Hat, Mirantis, and Hortonworks, and promises to create important bridges between the powerful data crunching capabilities of Hadoop and the cloud flexibility of OpenStack. 

As InfoWorld notes:

"The goal of the open source endeavor is to enable OpenStack users to easily provision and manage elastic Hadoop clusters on the cloud platform for such purposes as delivering 'analytics as a service' for ad-hoc or bursty analytic workloads, similar to Amazon Web Services' Elastic MapReduce."

The Savanna site also takes note of these key features:

- designed as an OpenStack component

- managed through REST API with UI available as part of OpenStack Dashboard;

- support for different Hadoop distributions:

- pluggable system of Hadoop installation engines;

- integration with vendor specific management tools, such as Apache Ambari or Cloudera Management Console;

Mirantis, which is a big backer of Savanna, recently  received $10 million in funding from Dell, Intel and WestSummit and is gaining momentum as an OpenStack specialist. It has an impressive list of customers working with it on OpenStack projects. The customers include AT&T, PayPal and The Gap.

Meanwhile, Hortonworks has mad a name for itself with its expertise at easing Hadoop deployments and Hadoop training. Savanna should become an important project, focused on two of the most important enterprise open source tools available.