Today, organizations need to analyze data from multiple sources and, to stay competitive, they need to do it when the data is fresh off the wire. But installing the software to take on this task can be onerous.
Open source software vendor Mesosphere plans to release a stack of integrated open source software that would make it easy for enterprises to capture data in real time and analyze it on the fly.
The stack, called Mesosphere Infinity, is based on Apache Mesos open source software for managing clusters of servers. Mesosphere offers a commercial edition of this open source software called the Mesosphere Data Center Operating System, which is used in this package.
"We noticed a pattern in heavy users of Mesos. They were all building these real-time data analytics platforms," said Matt Trifiro, Mesosphere chief marketing officer. "We identified a whole tier of enterprise customers that don't want to compose these things from individual pieces."
The stack could be used for detecting credit card fraud, and other anomalies. It could help in real-time personalization of Web services. It could also capture data generated by all the Internet-of-Things devices that will soon festoon the globe.
In addition to Mesos, the stack will initially include:
- Apache Spark, a general purpose platform for data processing and analysis.
- Apache Kafka, a messaging system for shuttling data among multiple applications.
- Apache Cassandra, a NoSQL-style distributed database.
- Akka, a framework for building distributed applications in Java.
Mesosphere Infinity is a "turnkey solution," he said, meaning that enterprises can easily install the software without a lot of configuration work.
The idea driving this software is similar to LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl or Python), a stack of software that is often used together to power Web applications, Leibert said.
Mesosphere has done all the difficult integration work, giving users a combined, integrated stack that can work with any workload no matter how large. The company will also provide commercial support for the package, which will be available early next year.
Over time, Mesosphere will introduce additional open source components for this package, as well as alternatives for the software already included, Trifiro said.
Also lending a hand in the integration work has been Cisco, which ensured that Mesosphere Infinity can run smoothly on Cisco Intercloud, a set of infrastructure software for running industrial-scale cloud services.
Cisco has been working with other companies to extend Mesos in other ways as well. The company helped Basho, which maintains the open source Riak NoSQL database, to develop a data analysis framework that uses Mesos to run a copy of Riak across a cluster of servers.
A Mesos-supported copy of Riak could be used to build a distributed data system for a network of hospitals and health care providers, ensuring that medical professionals could get the timely data on their patients no matter which facility they visit, said Adam Wray, Basho CEO.
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