Intel Aims to Enrich Lives by Unlocking the Power of Big Data

New Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop* Combines Intel Computing Hardware, Software for Improved Performance and Security

• The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software is built from the silicon up to deliver industry-leading performance and security to better utilize big data.
• New software offering now available and supported by more than 20 partners.  
• The combination of Intel’s powerful computing technologies and open software distribution promises to drive innovation and enable greater access to big data. 
• Intel is investing research and capital in disruptive technologies to spur innovation and enable the industry to build analytic solutions on Apache Hadoop platform.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 26, 2013 – To ensure more organizations and people have the ability to make use of the vast amounts of data that are generated, collected and stored everyday – also known as “big data” – Intel announced the availability of the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop* (Intel® Distribution) software. The software offering is built from the silicon up to deliver industry-leading performance and security.

The ability to analyze and make sense of big data has the profound potential to transform human society by enabling new scientific discoveries, business models and consumer experiences. Yet, only a small fraction of the world is able to extract meaning from all of this information because the technologies, techniques and skills available today are either too rigid for the data types or too expensive to deploy.

Hadoop is an open source framework for storing and processing large volumes of diverse data on a scalable cluster of servers that has emerged as the preferred platform for managing that data. With even more information coming from billions of sensors and intelligent systems also on the horizon, the framework must remain open and scalable as well as deliver on the demanding requirements of enterprise-grade performance, security and manageability.

“People and machines are producing valuable information that could enrich our lives in so many ways, from pinpoint accuracy in predicting severe weather to developing customized treatments for terminal diseases,” said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter Software Division. “Intel is committed to contributing to and supporting the open source community to provide the industry with a better foundation from which it can push the limits of innovation and realize the transformational opportunity of big data.”

Performance and Security: The Intel Difference
Intel is delivering an innovative open platform built on Apache Hadoop that can keep pace with the rapid evolution of big data analytics. The Intel Distribution is the first to provide full encryption with support of Intel® AES New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI) in the Intel® Xeon® processor.  By incorporating silicon-based encryption support of the Hadoop Distributed File System, organizations can now securely analyze their data sets without compromising performance.

The optimizations made for the networking and IO technologies in the Intel Xeon processor platform also enable new levels of analytic performance. Analyzing one terabyte of data, which would previously take more than four hours to fully process, can now be done in seven minutes thanks to the data-crunching combination of Intel’s hardware and the Intel Distribution. Considering the world generates one thousand terabytes of data every 30 seconds or the equivalent of 13 years of HD video, the power of Intel technology opens up the world to even greater possibilities.

For example, in a hospital setting, the intelligence derived from this data could help improve patient care by helping caregivers make quicker and more accurate diagnoses, determine effectiveness of drugs, drug interactions, dosage recommendations and potential side effects through the analysis of millions of electronic medical records, public health data and claims records.  Strict guidelines also exist globally for protecting health and payment information, making it imperative to maintain security and privacy while performing analytics.

The addition of the Intel® Manager for Apache Hadoop also simplifies the deployment, configuration and monitoring of the cluster for system administrators as they look to deploy new applications. Using the Intel® Active Tuner for Hadoop Software optimal performance is automatically configured to take the guesswork out of performance-tuning. Until now, this required a specialized understanding of each application’s use of system resources along with the Hadoop configuration and performance benchmarks.

Intel is working with strategic partners to integrate this software into a number of next-generation platforms and solutions, and to enable deployment in public and private cloud environments. The Intel Distribution is available in the United States and China and is supported by Amax*, Amazon*, Cisco*, Colfax*, Datameer*, Dell*, EnPointe*, Informatica*, Infosys*, Kitenga*, LucidWorks*, MarkLogic*, Pentaho*, Persistent*, Red Hat*, Revolution Analytics*, SAP*, SAS*, Savvis*, Silicon Mechanics*, SoftNet*, SuperMicro* and TeraData*.

A Comprehensive Approach to Big Data
The new software expands Intel’s extensive portfolio of datacenter computing, networking, storage, and intelligent systems products. The recently introduced Intelligent Systems Framework, a set of interoperable solutions designed to enable connectivity, manageability and security across intelligent devices in a consistent and scalable manner, sets the foundation to help to gather, analyze and deliver valuable information for end-to-end analytics from the device to the datacenter.

Additionally, Intel continues to invest in research and capital to advance the big data ecosystem. Intel Labs is at the forefront of advanced analytics research which includes the development of GraphLab, a library to construct large data sets into graphs to help visualize relationships between data. GraphLab is optimized for the Intel Distribution to help reduce development time by eliminating the need to develop large amounts of custom code. Meanwhile, Intel Capital has been making major investments in disruptive big data analytics technologies including MongoDB company 10gen and big data analytics solution provider Guavus Analytics.