MapR Launches M7 Big Data Platform on Amazon EMR

MapR Technologies, which has been one of the biggest proponents of Apache Hadoop, is taking its M7 Big Data platform for NoSQL and Hadoop to Amazon (AMZN) Web Services via Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). With the addition of M7 to EMR, all MapR versions (M3, M5 and now M7) are now available on EMR.

MapR M7 was designed to provide an easy-to-use, dependable and well-performing Big Data platform for Hadoop and NoSQL that is cost-effective to deploy and operate with elastic Hadoop clusters on AWS. According to the company, it only takes a few mouse clicks or a single line of code to launch a dynamically scalable M7 cluster on EMR to store and process “vast amounts of data.”

Fully supported on multiple AWS instance types, M7 is able to scale horizontally to thousands of nodes per cluster. MapR noted that benchmarks show M7 delivers to customers a consistent performance of more than 100,000 operations per second per node.

“Customers that want added flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness in the cloud can gain further benefits from MapR’s technology via AWS,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder of MapR Technologies, in a prepared statement.

MapR has been growing fairly quickly over the last while, in part due to the expected massive growth in the Hadoop space as well as because of funding that topped $30 million earlier this year. There’s still a question mark over Hadoop as a source of revenue for vendors and the channel, but a TechNavio report earlier this year indicated Hadoop-as-a-service would likely grow to $1.9 billion by 2016. It may only be a small slice of the Big Data pie, but vendors and partners that can find their niche should be able to develop a good business around Hadoop in the cloud.