Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


Nimbula and MapR Tackle Private Cloud-Based Hadoop

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/14/12

A company that offers a cloud platform has teamed up with another that distributes a version of Apache Hadoop to enable customers to expedite their cloud implementations of Hadoop clusters. The joint solution combines Nimbula Director with MapR Technologies' Hadoop distribution. It includes templates, recipes, and verification tests for running Hadoop on a Nimbula Director cloud.

Nimbula Director is a private cloud operating system that turns "bare metal servers with local disks" into multi-tenant pools of computing resources with a self-service interface for provisioning and de-provisioning of Hadoop and other jobs.

Hadoop is an open source framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. It can work on a single server or thousands of servers, each offering local computation and storage. Because it's architected to be highly available, Hadoop overcomes individual machine failures that can surface in the use of commodity hardware.

It's also commonly used in higher ed computing centers. For example, Stony Brook University uses Hadoop to process and extract statistics from a thousand-plus daily newspapers as well as historical archives. The University of Maryland is using its implementations to do research in machine translation, language modeling, bioinformatics, email analysis, and image processing. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Holland Computing Center is using Hadoop in student research projects.

With the latest announcement from Nimbula and MapR, customers can provision Hadoop clusters, according to the companies, in under two minutes. Users can launch Hadoop clusters on a private cloud without having to put in place the underlying computing infrastructure. The integration of technologies allows for sharing of infrastructure between Hadoop clusters with permissions as well as network and resource isolation. Hadoop and non-Hadoop workloads can run on the same infrastructure.

"With this solution, customers can have the best of two worlds. They can have big data processing from Hadoop with private cloud's ability to deliver low cost shared infrastructure that manages elastic demand between multiple tenants," said Jay Judkowitz, director of product marketing at Nimbula.

Nimbula Director is available for free for deployment of up to 40 cores. Customers can download a packaged VM template and application definition, load it into their Nimbula Director cloud, launch it, use it as long as they need, and remove it once their jobs are completed. That offering can be downloaded with registration from nimbula.com.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • VSLive! session

    VSLive! San Diego 2026 Puts AI at the Core of the Campus IT Stack

    For higher education IT teams working through AI pilots, ERP integrations, student-facing apps, analytics projects, and mounting security concerns, Visual Studio Live! San Diego 2026 offers a look at the development practices that are shaping the campus technology landscape.

  • networked node grid featuring illuminated connectors

    Infrastructure Accounts for More than Half of Worldwide AI Spending

    Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending will reach $2.67 trillion in 2026, up 49.5% from 2025, with AI infrastructure accounting for nearly $1.5 trillion, or about 56% of the total. For every dollar Gartner expects to be spent on generative AI models, more than $52 will be spent on infrastructure.

  • digital brain integrating legal regulation and security interface

    Agentic AI Moves from Pilot Phase to Production, Bringing Governance to the Forefront

    New research from Caylent, an AI-focused Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Services Partner, found that enterprises are already moving agentic AI beyond pilots and into production environments. At the same time, organizations are putting strict conditions around autonomy, making governance and control the next major challenge for enterprise AI adoption.

  • lock symbol with quantum bits in dynamic motion

    Microsoft Accelerates Focus on Quantum-Safe Security

    Microsoft is speeding up its quantum-safe security timeline, saying advances in quantum computing and new federal requirements have pushed post-quantum cryptography from a future planning issue into an immediate engineering priority.