ACI, Big Data, and DataTorrent

(This blog has been developed in association with Farid Jiandani, Product Manager with Cisco’s Insieme Networks Business Unit)

If you work for an enterprise that’s looking to hit its digital sweet spot, then you’re scrutinizing your sales, marketing and operations to see where you should make digital investments to innovate and improve productivity. Super-fast data processing at scale is being used to obtain real-time insights for digital business and Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives.

According to Gartner Group, one of the cool vendors in this area of providing super- fast big data analysis using in-memory streaming analytics is called DataTorrent, a startup founded by long-time ex-Yahoo! veterans with vast experience managing big data for leading edge applications and infrastructure at massive scale. Their goal is to empower today’s enterprises to experience the full potential and business impact of big data with a platform that processes and analyzes data in real-time.

DataTorrent RTS

DataTorrent RTS is an open-DataTorrent RTS provides a single, unified batch and stream processing platform that enables organizations to reduce time to market, development costs and operational expenditures for big data analytics applications. source, enterprise-grade unified platform for stream and batch processing on Hadoop.

DataTorrent RTS Integration with ACI

A member of the Cisco ACI ecosystem, DataTorrent announced on September 29th DataTorrent RTS integration with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) through the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to help create more efficient IT operations, bringing together network operations management and big data application management and development: DataTorrent Integrates with Cisco ACI to Help Secure Big Data Processing Through a Unified Data and Network Fabric.

With ACI integration, customers can also use DataTorrent’s analytics engine for more data sources than just Hadoop. Through integration from ACI’s NorthBound API’s, DataTorrent is able to dynamically control ACI to create filters within the network to allow or not allow access to other data bases that sit within the fabric. Using the dynamic nature of ACI, DataTorrent can control the programmable fabric to determine which inputs are securely utilized by DataTorrent RTS.

ACI Support for Big Data Solutions

The openness and the flexibility of ACI allow big data customers to run a wide variety of different applications within their fabric alongside Hadoop. Due to the elasticity of ACI, customers are able to run batch processing alongside other data base applications in a seamless fashion. In traditional Hadoop environments, the network is segmented based off of individual server nodes (see Figure 1). This makes it difficult to elastically allow access to and from different applications. Ultimately, within the ACI framework, logical demarcation points can be created based on application workloads rather than physical server groups (a set of Hadoop nodes should not be considered as a bunch of individual server nodes, rather a single group.)

Figure 1:

A Robust and Active Ecosystem

Many vendors claim they have a broad ecosystem of vendors, but sometimes that’s pure marketing, without any real integration efforts going on behind the slideware. But Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) has a very active ecosystem of industry leaders who are putting significant resources into integration efforts, taking advantage of ACI’s open Northbound and Southbound API’s. DataTorrent is just one example of an innovative company that is using ACI integration to add value to their solutions and deliver real benefits to their channel partners and customers.

Stay tuned for more success stories to come: we’ll continue to showcase industry leaders that are taking advantage of the open ACI API’s.

Additional References

https://www.cisco.com/go/aci

https://www.cisco.com/go/aciecosystem

http://www.datatorrent/com