EMC’s entrance into the commercial Hadoop market is a low risk, potentially high reward move by the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage vendor, as the market for Big Data processing and analytics technologies could reach into the billions of dollars in the coming years. However, the company faces significant hurdles as a new entrant into this space. We do not expect the new Greenplum HD appliance to gain significant adoption in the short-term, due in part to EMC’s lack of credibility in the open source Hadoop community and the company’s dearth of software-specific sales channels and experience in this emerging space.

Nonetheless, EMC’s moves marks a significant enterprise leader eyeing Hadoop opportunities with a strategy to simplify Hadoop deployments and deliver a higher value than current Hadoop distributions. We believe EMC’s long-term viability in this market depends on a number of interrelated factors. Specifically, EMC’s Hadoop gambit will succeed or fail based on how well the company works with the Apache Hadoop open source community; its ability to identify true market requirements and integrate its existing storage, database and other technology assets with the Hadoop framework; the depth of its ecosystem, and the development by EMC of new sales channels.

(Read Wikibon’s full analysis of EMC’s Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance here.)

Greenplum HD marries MPP Data Warehouse and Hadoop Framework

The new EMC appliance, called Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance and announced today at EMC World 2011, combines the Hadoop framework with Greenplum’s columnar-oriented, massively parallel processing data warehouse software and EMC’s commodity hardware.

It is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2011 in two forms: a community edition based on Facebook’s Hadoop distribution and an enterprise edition that supports multiple languages in addition to Java and likely includes EMC professional services and those of its partners.

EMC says the Greenplum HD appliance is deployable on a number of storage options, including HDFS, Cassandra, MapR and its own Isilon OneFS. It eliminates single-point of failure for NameNode, Job Tracker and other key components underlying Hadoop, according to EMC. And it enables real-time data processing when integrated with CasandraFS and MapR FS.

EMC also says the all-in-one appliance architecture will allow enterprises to deploy Hadoop installations significantly quicker than stitching together Hadoop’s individual open source components independently, or – by inference if not direct quote – faster than competing commercial Hadoop distributions from Cloudera and IBM.

Jeff Kelly is a Principal Research Contributor at Wikibon.org. He focuses on trends in business analytics and big data technologies. Reach Jeff by email at jeff.kelly@wikibon.org or Twitter at @jeffreyfkelly.