Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
of on-staff Hadoop committers, signifying Cloudera's ability to support production deployments and
drive the direction of the technology.
After deploying the DataGrid platform on CDH, Explorys decided to take advantage of the
Cloudera Enterprise subscription offering that bundles CDH with Cloudera Support and Cloudera
Manager, a software application that delivers visibility into and across Hadoop clusters for stream-
lined management, monitoring, and provisioning. Cloudera Enterprise gave Explorys the peace of
mind to continue operating its mission-critical Hadoop environment with a lean staff that could focus
on the core competencies of the business.
Hadoop impact
Explorys relies on CDH to provide the flexibility, scalability, and speed necessary to answer complex
questions on-the-fly. The window for analysis shrank from 30 days using traditional technologies to
seconds or minutes with Explorys' CDH-powered system. Meil explained,
We didn't invent clinical quality measures, but the ability to generate those measures on a rapid
basis, support hundreds of them, implement complex attribution logic, and manifest that with
a slick user interface on top, that's revolutionary. Cloudera provides the technology that allows
us to address traditional challenges in medicine and in operational reporting with a radical new
approach.
With traditional systems, it is cumbersome to make changes to the data and then reprocess it. “The
ability to have that data ready within a day is game changing,” noted McHale. “Without Hadoop, it
would be extremely challenging to do and certainly not cost effective.”
Because Hadoop uses industry-standard hardware, the cost per terabyte of storage is, on average,
ten times cheaper than a traditional relational data warehouse system. Lougheed said,
We'd be spending literally millions more dollars than we are today on relational database technolo-
gies and licensing. Those technologies are important, but they're important in their place. For Big
Data analytics, storage, and processing, Hadoop is a perfect solution. It has brought opportunities
for us to rechannel those funds, that capital, in directions of being more innovative, bringing more
products to bear, and ultimately hiring more people for the company as opposed to buying licenses.
On Cloudera Enterprise, Meil noted, “We have a nontrivial system operations team and any help
we can get in terms of operational support and tooling for the management of our cluster is critical.
I definitely see the value in Cloudera Enterprise.”
Lougheed summarized, “We were forced to think about a less expensive, more efficient technol-
ogy from the beginning, and in hindsight, I'm glad that we were. For us—needing storage, high-
capacity index, and analytics—Hadoop really made a lot of sense. And from a partner perspective,
Cloudera is one of the most influential that we've had throughout the years.”
Key highlights
Technologies
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Hadoop platform: Cloudera Enterprise
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Hadoop components: HBase, HDFS, and MapReduce
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Metadata mart: MySQL
