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MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

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Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#71

Post by marmaduke »

saganus wrote: post #68
joehandzik wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what the workload is and if performance or scale are priorities. Our team and the products we build come from the HPC side of the fence and we've been engaged with all sorts of large businesses that know their performance requirements (think 100s of GB/s read bandwidth), and it leads them down the path of either HPC filesystems or newer NVMe-oriented filesystems. Does 'AI' or 'data science' alway…

Wow... how do you achieve petabytes of NVMe? like, what is the biggest drive that you can get today? And then you just plug a ton of them into what kind of "motherboard" to interconnect them? I guess Infiniband based bus? or I am totally off-base here? Any more details are appreciated, if only to satisfy my curiosity :)

Dell sells poweredges with 3.84 TB nvme drives, some of the 2U servers can pack 24 IIRC. If you do RAID10, 1PB is “only” 100U roughly.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#72

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

threeseed wrote: post #41
dmix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really familiar with this industry. Are these Hadoop clusters hosted locally by these businesses? And MapR et all were providing the software/consulting to help manage them? Then I'm guessing better cloud hosted options came out offering similar capabilities. If that's the case was it really a big surprise that "cloud" hosting would eat any self-hosted platform's lunch?

So in the very recent past (i.e. a few years) businesses wanting to do Data Science ran a distro of Hadoop e.g. MapR that they bought from the vendor. They charged an exorbitant charge per node (e.g. $10k) because they figured they would get people to switch from Teradata or Oracle. Now what the cloud offered was so much more compelling. You had per hour pricing on the order of $20 for a minimal cluster. You had unli…

Which is hilarious, given how expensive it is to run analytics on AWS. My current company looked into recreating our internal analytics environment on the cloud, and realised that it wouldn't be cost effective.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#73

Post by mruts »

SEJeff wrote: post #21
bitL wrote: post #18

Weren't they killed the moment Spark appeared, having heavily invested in accelerating Hadoop? I am surprised that Cloudera is still around...

And spark was sort of killed by Storm / Heron as even Spark Streaming does microbatches and isn't truly realtime.

No one uses Storm anymore. It was Spark that killed Storm, not the other way around.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#74

Post by hc91 »

mbreese wrote: post #65
notyourday wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all sucked. MapR sucked the least. Considering a comparable EMC solution was ~20x more expensive and less flexible, MapR happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right software but blew it because they decided they knew better what the customers needed to buy vs what the customers wanted to buy. Fundamentally, file system clusters are a very difficult business to get into and make enough mone…

I remember being in a pitch meeting with MapR a few years ago. It was for a large academic institution’s HPC group. We were all very interested in their NFS/HDFS tools, which would have met a very critical need. They just kept talking about the Hadoop workflows, which wouldn’t have flown at all for this group. Most HPC workflows/tools don’t map very well to Hadoop or at the minimum would have required tools to have b…

CERN?

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#75

Post by sitkack »

jcims wrote: post #64
xkgt wrote: post #62

As many others pointed out, these product vendors are getting killed by the cloud (I am not saying whether it is good or bad). On-demand compute and storage scalability of cloud makes perfect sense for Big data infrastructure. These companies are failing because they can't establish a use case of running their product on cloud. It is ironic because when AWS started EMR, MapR was one of the distributions they offered…

Which has to be a gut punch because EMR feels like a bag of bolts rather than any kind of polished system.

And MapR is so much more efficient than vanilla Hadoop, AWS definitely makes more money off the less polished yet mainstream version.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#76

Post by jrg »

purplezooey wrote: post #19

I think they'll be fine. At my last company we had a large MapR cluster and it was hands down more reliable and user-friendly than anything else. Maybe Cloudera will pick them up.

We've used them as a more reliable/resilient/replicated (with a lower operational effort) provider of HBase tables and Kafka streams, and a bit of file storage.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#77

Post by mbreese »

hc91 wrote: post #74
mbreese wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember being in a pitch meeting with MapR a few years ago. It was for a large academic institution’s HPC group. We were all very interested in their NFS/HDFS tools, which would have met a very critical need. They just kept talking about the Hadoop workflows, which wouldn’t have flown at all for this group. Most HPC workflows/tools don’t map very well to Hadoop or at the minimum would have required tools to have b…

CERN?

No, this was at Stanford a few years ago, so not close to CERN level HPC.

Our lab has modest compute requirements, but need a ton of storage, so we were very interested in a mid-range storage option.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#78

Post by heyyyouu »

atombender wrote: post #63

Lots of interesting discussion here about billions of files and what not. I don't really work with big data -- the largest amounts of data I work with are in the range of tens of millions at most, and my modest "ETL" is about reading from APIs and cleaning up incoming data into consistent schemas, refining data (e.g. geocoding addresses, or correlating against public demographic records/statistics), a process that is…

This is a great question -- I'd love to know this too. I watch this space from the enterprise perspective and I see a lot of big data talk/prep but not so much execution, if that makes sense.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#79

Post by vkoepnick »

notyourday wrote: post #51
noir-york wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting post. Out of curiosity: aren't there others who have developed cluster storage exposed as NFS / FUSE?

They all sucked. MapR sucked the least. Considering a comparable EMC solution was ~20x more expensive and less flexible, MapR happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right software but blew it because they decided they knew better what the customers needed to buy vs what the customers wanted to buy. Fundamentally, file system clusters are a very difficult business to get into and make enough mone…

The sweet spot you describe sounds like Quobyte to me.

Re: MapR may shut down as investor pulls out after ‘extremely poor results’

#80

Post by xkgt »

sitkack wrote: post #75
jcims wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which has to be a gut punch because EMR feels like a bag of bolts rather than any kind of polished system.

And MapR is so much more efficient than vanilla Hadoop, AWS definitely makes more money off the less polished yet mainstream version.

IMO it is not a fair comparison between EMR and MapR flavor of hadoop as they are designed for different usecases. MapR and other flavors of hadoop are engineered to make the task of administering a long running cluster easy. In comparison, EMR has a rudimentary set of tools for peaking into a running cluster.

Whereas AWS offering is ideally suited for transient clusters. It relies on other solutions like Athena, Redshift Spectrum to cater for ad-hoc use cases such as querying and reporting. In this regard, EMR has much better support for programmability and elastic resource provisioning which is really important for transient clusters.

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