Hadoop, first used by large cloud providers like Yahoo, Facebook and Google, is designed to allow massive amounts of compute resources to process very large, unstructured datasets. The technology is now firmly entrenched in government agencies and is now working its way into more traditional enterprise IT. The goal of a Hadoop project is to improve decision making by providing rapid and accurate answers. The larger the data set the more accurate those answers. The more servers that can be applied to that task the faster those decisions can be made.
What is Hadoop?
Hadoop was created as an open source software solution to enable organizations to do this kind of massive scale processing across a very large data set. The standard Hadoop architecture has four components. The two most obvious components are the compute component and the storage component. On the compute component of the Hadoop process, called MapReduce, this is an algorithmic approach to processing a large data set and trying to “reduce” it to a smaller more manageable data set from which users can then draw conclusions.
One of the basic tenets of Hadoop is to take the compute to where the data is. Typically there is so much data to be processed that it would be inefficient to move the data over a network to a compute node. To accomplish this Hadoop uses the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), which allows data to be partitioned across nodes in a cluster. Each of these “slave” nodes will run their own MapReduce function as well as store parts of the total data set to be processed.
Hadoop uses a master node as a job tracker to parse out all the required data processing tasks to the slave Hadoop nodes in the Hadoop cluster. It makes sure that each slave node runs the right MapReduce function for the data that it is currently storing. This allows processing of the data to occur locally. The results from each slave node are then funneled up to the master for analysis and conclusion.
The Storage Challenges with Hadoop
There are three key challenges that Hadoop creates for traditional enterprises looking to implement it. The first is capacity inefficiency. To protect data, HDFS as a default makes three copies of the dataset, so that if a node or its drive fails, data is still accessible on other nodes. The 3X requirement is particularly significant in the Hadoop use case because these are typically very large data sets. Multiple Petabytes (PB) are not uncommon. Imagine if your core data set is 3PB, that means you will need to have enough capacity to store at least 9PBs of information. Cost of capacity can be a big concern when designing a Hadoop design.
The second challenge is the master node. It contains all the meta-data information for the Hadoop cluster and all that information is typically stored on direct attached storage. Loss of the master node means loss of the cluster. While data centers will try to apply various forms of high availability, maintaining master node uptime is a constant concern. There is also a secondary concern of I/O contention as this master node receives updates from the secondary nodes.
The third challenge is when to move data into the Hadoop cluster. Most of the time the data set to be analyzed is created and managed by some other process and stored on a more traditional file or object based storage system.
Can Object Storage Help?
As we will detail in our next column, there are a number of areas where Object Storage can make the Hadoop environment more efficient and easier to manage. The use of technologies like erasure coding can reduce the need for 3X copies of data and it can make the system less dependent on the master server by making it easier to replace with a standby server. Finally object storage can become the “data lake”. This allows all data to be put in a single repository, but also can perform the processing so tasks like MapReduce can run directly on the attached nodes.
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Twelve years ago George Crump founded Storage Switzerland with one simple goal; to educate IT professionals about all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought after public speaker. With over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN, Virtualization, Cloud and Enterprise Flash. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.
While erasure coding does appear to fix the “cost of storage” problem, most object store implementations I’ve seen it will break the basic Hadoop tenet of moving the compute to the data as the data from any object will likely be spread across multiple nodes hence inducing some sort of network transfer into the mix.
Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework written in Java for distributed storage and distributed processing of very large data sets on computer clusters built from commodity hardware. and organizations are using this on a large scale to manage data. nice to see object storage details here. thanks for share.
Priyanka – http://www.kyvosinsights.com