Despite the success of cloud offerings such as AWS, Big Data managed services offered entirely in the cloud are not the preferred option for many organizations. Either because of legal restrictions, sheer volumes of data generated, security concerns or other reasons -- many businesses choose to keep their data on premise where the opportunity for a true managed service, until now, has essentially not been an option.
The ClusterGX™ Full-Service offering is an obvious next step in Galactic Exchange's hybrid on-premise/cloud deployment architecture. Whilst all user data stays securely on the customer premise where it is processed via applications running on ClusterGX, any Hadoop/Spark master nodes -- which do not touch the actual user data and therefore do not compromise security - are run off-site as a cloud service operated by Galactic Exchange. As a result, Galactic Exchange is ideally positioned to provide pro-active monitoring of the master nodes as well as the associated on-premise cluster performance and the actual status of Hadoop/Spark jobs that are running on each cluster.
"A customer could manage their own ClusterGX™ deployment through our cloud portal," said Rob Mustarde, co-founder and CEO of Galactic Exchange. "but in many cases they may not have deep knowledge of Hadoop/Spark, they may need assistance with application deployment and probably cannot monitor their jobs running from start to finish. With ClusterGX™ Full-Service, we can consult and then assist all the way through cluster set-up, HDFS data ingestion, application deployment and then provide a 24/7 cluster monitoring service to review cluster performance and ensure that Hadoop/Spark jobs are running to completion."
"Galactic Exchange is offering a great alternative to businesses looking to stand-up a big data analytics solution but that have challenges recruiting deep platform expertise and concerns about data security. With the unique ClusterGX™ Full-Service, businesses can now take immediate advantage of a managed service offering but at the same time keep their data on-premise," said Mike Matchett, Senior Analyst at technology consultants Taneja Group. "It's another solid example of how cloud-hosted management as-a-service can solve real data center problems. Leveraging a cloud provider to maintain all the Hadoop/Spark master nodes makes hosting a Big Data analytics cluster on-premise so much easier -- but then big data users can also gain from the expert value-added services wrapped around those cloud-based master node operations."
City of San Jose Smartens Up to Big Data with ClusterGX™ Full-Service
As the Capitol of Silicon Valley, the City of San Jose is recognized as a leader and pioneer in the adoption of new technology. Their Smart City initiative covers areas as diverse as IoT, Transportation, Cleantech and Cyber-Security. One area that has been lacking is taking advantage of the large volumes of data that the City generates.
"We are in the business of putting Big Data to work for our community; we are not in the business of managing complex Big Data solutions. With City technical staff wearing many hats these days, Big Data just needs to work. We aren't Big Data experts," said Vijay Sammeta, Chief Information Officer for the City of San Jos?. "The City generates a lot of data across a broad spectrum of areas. There is constant demand, internally and externally, to provide access, insight, and ultimately action based on that data. ClusterGX™ Full-Service brings the power of open source with enterprise manageability in a single solution that is easily deployed on-premise."
In partnership with Galactic Exchange, the City has deployed ClusterGX™ in its datacenter and has begun the process of gathering numerous data sources in which to model "what-if" scenarios for City planning. "Having ClusterGX™ as well as our data on-premise means we are learning the world of Big Data much more quickly than if we just out-sourced it to a 3rd party in the cloud," said Sammeta. "Using ClusterGX™ Full-Service and having Galactic Exchange as our partner has made the implementation painless. After many years of consolidation and deep budget cuts, we thought introducing Big Data to the City was going to be a costly, challenging and prolonged process, but that simply hasn't been our experience."
