This year’s Strata + Hadoop World conference, held March 28-31 in San Jose, marked an interesting event – the 10th anniversary of Apache Hadoop*. Though Hadoop’s birthday was celebrated with circus-like festivities on the show’s second evening, I did notice that this year’s conference centered less on Hadoop than in previous years. Instead, the conference focused more on the cluster-computing analytics framework Spark, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and the ongoing challenge of deriving analytical insights from big data.
Intel had a substantial presence at the show, with a number of keynote speakers, sponsored sessions, an announcement about cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace and the open source Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) driven by Intel, and other events to showcase its latest advances in big data and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
Thursday morning’s keynotes got off to a bang when writer and entrepreneur Alistair Croll (@acroll) welcomed the audience with a story of his lost jeans. Apparently, Croll’s luggage was misplaced on the way to San Jose, which sent him on a fruitless shopping trip to the mall to buy a replacement pair.
This proved to be the perfect set-up for Bob Rogers (@scientistBob), chief data scientist for big data solutions at Intel, and his presentation “Advanced analytics and the mystery of the missing jeans.” Rogers discussed how Intel and Levis has been working together to address a major problem in retail: Inventory accuracy in brick and mortar stores is only 65 percent. This means that 35 percent of the time, merchandise that is supposed to be in stock, isn’t. Rogers provided an overview of an analytics retail solution built for Levis that links IoT data from RFID inventory tags, video cameras, and sensors and transmits it via Intel® IoT Gateways to cloud-based advanced analytics engines on TAP. Watch this video for a glimpse into how Intel’s IoT and advanced analytics technologies have helped Levis make smarter business decisions and better serve its customers.
Bridget Karlin, the managing director of Intel’s Internet of Things Group, joined Bob Rogers for another session on IoT and TAP called “Master the Internet of Things with Integrated Analytics.” Intel offers a complete IoT platform that begins with reference architectures and extends to products and technologies from Intel and its partners to create an open, secure and scalable approach to IoT solutions. Karlin and Rogers discussed how applying analytics platforms such as TAP to rich data streams from IoT networks have the capacity to deliver enormous value to many industries, including healthcare, energy and utilities, and retail.
Figure 1. Intel’s IoT Platform extends from edge to advanced analytics in the cloud.
These IoT systems are particularly powerful when they offer real-time analytics, not just from the cloud, but also from the network edge. Intel has worked closely with SAP to deliver an end-to-end IoT solution that can deliver actionable business insights on a near real-time basis. Watch this video featuring Karlin and Irfan Khan, CTO for Global Customer Operations at SAP, to learn more about the joint Intel-SAP IoT solution, and read the solution brief Business Intelligence at the Edge to find out how real-time data from the network edge helps protect remote workers and improves customer engagement and sales in retail applications.
During the same week as Strata + Hadoop World, Intel also announced the ]general availability of the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family](https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-makes-move-to-the-cloud-faster-easier/), which provides a strategic foundation for building modern, software-defined cloud infrastructures. The new processor family delivers improved performance for cloud workloads, with more than 20 percent more cores and cache than the prior generation , plus enhanced security and faster memory support. According to recent benchmarks, Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 chips delivered up to 1.22x higher performance on procedural workloads (such as MapReduce workloads on Apache Hadoop clusters). The new chips also delivered up to 1.27x higher performance for BigBench queries , a benchmark that measures efficient processing of big data analytics.
Included in the release was news that Intel is expanding its popular Intel® Cloud Builders program, which brings together reference architectures, solutions blueprints and leading solution providers to help facilitate the delivery of modern computing infrastructures, to include software defined infrastructure use cases. The Cloud Builders program is now joined by Intel® Network Builders and Intel® Storage Builder programs, which aim to accelerate adoption of software-defined storage and network innovations.
My last stop at the conference was at the SAP kiosk, where I filmed a Periscope video of our friend, Karen Sun introducing SAP HANA Vora. Vora* is an in-memory computing engine for Hadoop that runs on the Apache Spark* execution framework and helps sift massive volumes of unstructured data in hierarchies to simplify big data management in SAP HANA and Hadoop environments. Intel contributed engineering and enablement efforts for Spark, which SAP HANA Vora is based on, to maximize performance and security on Intel® architectures.
From lost jeans to Vora, Strata + Hadoop World was a busy, eventful show with engaging, provocative keynotes and events. The highlights are available for viewing on the Strata web site.
Follow me at @TimIntel and #TechTim to keep up with the latest with Intel and SAP.
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