How are businesses using Apache Spark to play with data? Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) has some insight into what customers need and want when it comes to using Spark.

Chris Selland, VP of business development, Big Data, at HPE, spoke with Jeff Frick and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at Spark Summit East 2016.

Customers playing with Spark

“[There’s] a lot of excitement and enthusiasm building around Spark,” said Selland.

So how are customers wanting to marry Spark & Vertica or HP Software Portfolio? HP launched a connector last fall to Spark, and it has been letting customers play with it. There are two primary use cases: ETL-like (extract, transform and load) capabilities for transforming and loading data, along with analytics and modeling.

“That seems to be certainly where I would say the most enthusiasm is right now from customers,” said Selland.

Hot, warm and cold data

There is a concept that Selland referred to as hot, warm and cold data — cold data being the oldest data from years back, and hot being real-time data. Does Spark do the analytics, or Veritca? Customers right now are experimenting with it.

“I don’t know if there’s a single answer for that just yet,” said Selland. Customers want to have the data, storage is easy, so why wouldn’t they want to keep everything? Even if people aren’t touching cold data a lot, they do want to be able to get to it and use the same tools as they do with their hot data. HP is focused on providing a single virtual query capability across different tiers of data.

“We’re doing what our customers are asking us to,” said Selland.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Spark Summit East 2016. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE