Database Reference
In-Depth Information
BigInsights Editions: Basic and Advanced
BigInsights comes in two editions: a free offering (Basic), and a for-fee offer-
ing (Enterprise). BigInsights Basic Edition is IBM's integrated, tested, and
preconfigured download for anyone who wants to experiment with Hadoop.
This edition includes the BigInsights installer, which gives you a quick and
simple clickable path to your own Hadoop cluster. As a package of open
source components, this represents the IBM Distribution for Hadoop. With
the exception of a few database connectors and some of the tooling functions,
none of the analytics, integration, or operational excellence features are included
in this distribution. If you ever want to move to the Enterprise Edition, it's a
seamless process.
BigInsights Enterprise Edition includes all of the features in BigInsights
Basic Edition plus the analytics, integration, and operational excellence capa-
bilities that we describe later in this chapter. Included with this license is also
a limited use license for Streams, which entitles you to run streaming data
jobs in conjunction with your data-at-rest processing using BigInsights
(there's lots of integration here—more on that in the next chapter). To reflect
different kinds of deployments, BigInsights Enterprise Edition also has a
non-production license, and a starter kit license.
Deploying BigInsights
Hadoop—and by extension, BigInsights—is designed to be deployed on a
cluster of many individual computers with dedicated storage and processing
resources. Failover and redundancy capabilities are built into Hadoop with
the expectation that it is to be deployed on inexpensive and eventually unre-
liable hardware. We refer to this kind of computing resource as
commodity
hardware
, specifically, Intel chipsets with standard spinning disk storage.
This is in contrast to the robust, high-quality, and, of course, expensive hard-
ware that we see deployed in data warehouse servers, for example.
Ease of Use: A Simple Installation Process
The BigInsights installer was designed with simplicity in mind. IBM's devel-
opment teams asked themselves, “How can IBM cut the time-to-Hadoop
curve without the effort and technical skills normally required to get open
