Database Reference
In-Depth Information
source software up and running?” They answered this question with the
BigInsights installer.
The main objective of the BigInsights installer is to insulate you from
complexity. As such, you don't need to worry about software prerequisites
or determining which Apache Hadoop components to download. You don't
need to worry about the configuration between these components or the
overall setup of the Hadoop cluster. The BigInsights installer does all of this
for you, and all you need to do is click a button. Hadoop startup complex-
ity is all but eliminated with BigInsights. Quite simply, your experience is
going to be much like installing any commercial software.
What's more, you can use IBM's installation program to graphically build
a response file, which you can subsequently use to deploy BigInsights on all
of the nodes in your cluster in an automated fashion.
A Low-Cost Way to Get Started:
Running BigInsights on the Cloud
With the rise of virtualization technologies, the Cloud has become a popular
platform for businesses to leverage IT resources. Given the significant work
involved in procuring and building a moderately sized Hadoop cluster, it
would seem that Cloud technologies were designed with Hadoop in mind.
Let's say that you're interested in seeing what BigInsights can do for your
business. You have a large data set, and you have analysts and developers ready
to experiment with it. If you're considering an on-site experimental Hadoop
installation, it could take weeks, if not months, for the procurement process to
run its course, and for the hardware to finally be installed. On the other hand,
you could have a made-to-order Cloud-based BigInsights cluster up and
running within hours. Let's take this scenario a little further, and imagine that
your data is loaded on this Cloud-based cluster, and that your analysts are
working away. If some aspect of performance is poor, no problem! Additional
resources (memory, data nodes, CPU) can be added dynamically to your clus-
ter. This is another reason why the Cloud is such a great option for trial deploy-
ments: there's no need to spend a lot of time ironing out reference architecture
details. With the Cloud, if it doesn't work, make adjustments in real time.
Like other components in the IBM Big Data platform, BigInsights works
well in Cloud deployments. From a technology perspective, BigInsights
