MapR Rolls Out an Enterprise-Grade Apache Spark Distribution

MapR Technologies, known for its focus on Hadoop, has announced at this week's Spark Summit conference a new enterprise-grade Apache Spark distribution.  Spark, of course, has drawn billions of dollars of development commitments from organizations including IBM.

This new distribution includes the complete Spark stack engineered to support advanced analytic applications, along with patented innovations in the MapR Platform, plus several open source projects that complement Spark. MapR claims that from the deployment of real-time applications to the evolution of how those applications expand within an organization, the Spark-focused distribution for MapR can serve as a starting point for leveraging Spark.

“ESG research shows Apache Spark adoption is poised to grow quickly, with 16% of businesses already in production and another 47% very interested in implementing Spark,” said Nik Rouda, senior analyst, ESG. “As such, Spark will power the next wave of big data. Yet enterprises will demand a robust platform to meet their operational requirements. MapR is helping to accelerate Spark by addressing this need.” 

According to MapR:

"The new distribution enables all advanced analytics including batch processing, machine learning, procedural SQL, and graph computation.  Because Spark runs seamlessly on MapR it benefits from the platform’s patented enterprise-grade features such as web-scale storage, high availability, mirroring, snapshots, NFS, integrated security, global namespace, etc.  This native integration makes it the only reliable and production-ready platform for Spark workloads on-premise and in thecloud.  Product extensions of the distribution could include real-time streaming and operational analytic capabilities, with MapR-Streams, MapR-DB, and Hadoop as add-ons."

“This is a great example of MapR continued commitment to open source Apache Spark," said John Tripier, senior director of business development, Databricks. "MapR was early to recognize the impact Spark would have on the big data landscape, and we are excited to see them extending the power of Spark for their enterprise customers with this announcement."

Folks everywhere in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark. Last summer, IBM announced a major commitment to Spark, billing it as  "potentially the most important new open source project in a decade that is being defined by data."

IBM and other companies are tying Spark initiatives to the rise of the Internet of Things, too. As data and analytics are embedded into all kinds of objects and apps as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) push, IBM claims that "Spark brings essential advances to large-scale data processing." 

You can read about additional Spark distribution details on the MapR Converge Community page.