Intel and Oracle Join Hands Over Hadoop 

Two old-guard players will be standing together against challengers in the rising data tide, revealed Doug Fisher, general manager of software and services at Intel at Oracle’s OpenWorld 2013 event this week. During his keynote this week, Fisher announced that Intel and Oracle are working together to combine Intel’s Hadoop peanut butter, and Oracle’s database chocolate into a single environment.

Commenting on Intel’s commitment to evolve their roadmap to meet the ever changing computing needs of the IT organization, Fisher told the Oracle OpenWorld audience that the two companies are currently in the process of certifying Intel’s distribution for Apache Hadoop on Oracle’s Big Data Connectors.

The plan, says Fisher, is to provide customers with a name brand value chain for both structured and unstructured data management, providing customers with some sense of familiarity, and thus security, as they deploy next world architectures that involve Hadoop.

Intel has been busy since it first hitched Xeon to the Hadoop wagon earlier this year, promising optimization for both the hardware and software stacks supporting Hadoop clusters, and making them “enterprise ready.” In that time, they got to work on a Java class that enables the ability to replace the oft-maligned HDFS file system native to Hadoop with their own Lustre file system, which has roots managing data in high performance computing environments.

The move could be seen to elevate Intel’s position in the Hadoop wars. Where they’ve mostly stood on the sidelines doing their own thing while the Hadoop distro vendors have been busy bloodying themselves over search integration and the speed of SQL-like querying capabilities, this move shows where Intel expects to be as enterprises start to adopt Hadoop and other big data technologies – right next to their old buddy, Oracle.

According to Gartner this week, adoption of big data technologies are picking up with 64 percent of businesses polled saying that they currently have either invested or have plans to invest in big data. Having connectors that plug right into existing Oracle environments could be a winning strategy for the chip maker as these businesses come online.