With the rise of unstructured and structured data, enterprises have started demanding agile approaches and solutions to data storage, management and analytics without bearing exorbitant cost. However, owing to high complexity, costs, data latency and redundancy presented by traditional data solutions, CIOs get wary about continuing to implement the same. To help these CIOs realize a more modern approach, several technology vendors have started establishing Hadoop as the cornerstone of the data storage ecosystem. Although Hadoop is successful at processing large volumes of data and lowers the cost of data storage, its full value is often not realized, since many vendors in this space simply provide Hadoop software and leave the users to manage everything else on their own. Since implementing and running Hadoop is highly complex, this often results in limited benefits. California-based Altiscale not only provides a full Hadoop ecosystem in the cloud but also operates Hadoop for its customers, thus allowing them to experience high performance without the burdens of deploying and operating Hadoop.

“Altiscale offers a full Hadoop ecosystem in the cloud, which means that we provide not only high-performance data storage and processing capability, but a full workbench of tools (including Spark and Hive) that is required for data scientists and business analysts to do their jobs well,” said Mike Maciag, COO, Altiscale. The company takes pride in its team of Hadoop experts, who have been working with the solution since its early days. The Altiscale founding team had the experience of running a 40,000 node implementations against half of an Exabyte of data, for the use of 1,000 users and analysts at Yahoo!

Since its inception in 2012, Altiscale has been focused on helping its customers realize the benefits of the power of Hadoop and go beyond the challenges of traditional analytics solutions. Unlike traditional business intelligence solutions that focus only on well-structured data, Hadoop allows companies to take advantage of a broader range of information, including unstructured data. In addition, these traditional solutions are exceptionally cost prohibitive, facing challenges that limit their ability to scale and process massive volume of data. Hadoop is less expensive and offers computing and storage capabilities that scale from terabytes to beyond. The Altiscale Data Cloud is a comprehensive service that covers key operations like Hadoop deployment, automated management and proactive support, so that users can experience faster, reliable, scalable and optimized Hadoop performance.

“Customers who have switched to Altiscale have seen up to a tenfold performance improvement,” said Maciag. Seizing the opportunity, Altiscale has seen increasing interest not only from internet-based businesses, but from major traditional industries such as financial services, manufacturing, health care, and retail.