Hadoop – it’s not just hype! The community has shown tremendous interest in our plans for Hadoop – what will be supported, when it will be available, and so on. We’ve been blogging about big data and provided early plans for Hadoop, including SAS/ACCESS support for Hadoop. Well, it's official: SAS support for Hadoop is now available, and it's generating a lot of excitement.

In addition to customer interest, we’ve also received positive feedback from numerous analysts that were briefed on our product plans. At our recent analyst conference in Steamboat, CO, the following tweets from Forrester’s James Kobielus sum up the reception there:

What is the basis for Forrester saying that SAS is a big player in the Hadoop market? In this blog post and another to follow tomorrow, I will show how SAS Hadoop plans offer value to enterprises looking to use big data to produce valuable insights. I'll provide an overview of our plans for Hadoop, including thoughts on how the SAS approach is different from what other vendors are providing. This post and the follow-up tomorrow are lengthy (can you tell I'm excited?). Here are the topics that I'll cover in each:

This post:

• SAS Big Data Analytics (It’s Not Just Hadoop)
• Introduction to SAS and Hadoop
• SAS Support for Hadoop – Available Now

Tomorrow:

• Under the Hood: A Peek at the Technology
• SAS Hadoop Value Summary
• A Note About the Future

 

SAS Big Data Analytics (it’s not just Hadoop)

Long before the term big data was coined, SAS customers applied complex analytical processes to large data volumes. SAS was designed from the beginning to scale and perform well in any environment, and was also designed so to take advantage of new complementary technologies. Over the years, the SAS user community has evolved with new technologies relating to performance and scalability, including grid, in-database and in-memory technologies. The users benefited from great performance regardless of the platform, including optimization for SMP desktop implementations, MPP and grid deployments. A rich variety of SAS technologies, including high-performance analytics, event processing and others, are available and appropriate for those enterprises with big data environments.

And organizations rely on SAS to do much more than manage data, looking for SAS to provide a complete analytics life cycle that can be applied to big data. This extends their ability to work with a massive number of models, massive complexity in terms of the types of models, and a massive number of variables. They have come to depend on SAS to support a complete data scenario, and the ability to identify the most relevant data for processing or analysis based on a stream, score and store model.

Introduction to SAS & Hadoop

Customers can pair their SAS technologies with products from a number of leading database and data warehouse vendors so that world-leading analytics can be used with these popular data store technologies. The same approach is now extended to the Hadoop environment, an open-source distributed file system that leverages commodity hardware. Hadoop is capable of storing and processing massive amounts of data. Support for Hadoop extends customers' big data abilities and complements their existing data strategies.

Although there are a lot of technical details involving the various Apache subprojects and Hadoop-based capabilities, SAS support for Hadoop can be boiled down to a simple statement:

Hadoop data can now be leveraged using SAS. The power of SAS Analytics has now been extended to Hadoop.

Just like other data sources, data can be consumed across the SAS stack in a transparent fashion. This means that analytic tools already in place (such as SAS Enterprise Miner), tools relating to data management (such as SAS Data Integration Studio), and foundation tools (such as Base SAS) can be used to work with Hadoop data. What you have now becomes even more valuable.

 

SAS Support for Hadoop - Available Now!

SAS Hadoop support Hadoop provides the following summary benefits:

Please check back tomorrow when we'll take a look at some of the technology details in the SAS Hadoop support, summarize the value and consider the future.