Oracle has that perfect holiday present for data scientists … the just announced Oracle Big Data Appliance X3-2 includes the latest microprocessors from Intel, plus a distribution of Cloudera’s Hadoop, together with Cloudera Manager. Specifically, Oracle is tapping Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 8-core chips (sometimes referred to as Sandy Bridge), and the appliance can be configured up to 288 cores.
Some highlights of the new appliance:
* Support for Cloudera’s CDH4.1 release, including software upgrades developed collaboratively with Cloudera to simplify NameNode High Availability in Hadoop, eliminating the single point of failure in a Hadoop cluster.
* Inclusion of the Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition 2.0 with improved Hadoop integration, elastic scaling and new APIs, including JSON and C support.
* Oracle Big Data Connectors have been enhanced to enable greater SQL access to Hadoop from Oracle Database and to enable more transparent access to Hadoop from R.
* The Oracle Enterprise Manager plug-in for Big Data Appliance that complements Cloudera Manager to enable users to more easily manage a Hadoop cluster.
* Updated distributions of Oracle Linux and Oracle Java Development Kit.
* An updated distribution of open source R, optimised to work with high performance multi-threaded math libraries.
