Qubole Broadens IaaS and Big Data Reach with Support for Google Compute Engine

Managed service provider (MSP) Qubole is expanding its reach by making its offering available on the new Google Compute Engine. The company, a provider of a managed Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) solution, previously only made its offering available on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The expansion to Google comes a month after Google announced its IaaS offering, which includes a new storage model, expanded operating system support and live migration capabilities. With competition in the IaaS and big data arena heating up as major names take on AWS, we can expect many more announcements like this in 2014.

Qubole’s HaaS offering (also known as Hadoop in the cloud) offers a number of benefits over on-premise deployments, mainly in the areas of customization and flexibility. The offering enables Apache Hadoop or one of its distributions like Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR to be installed in an IaaS environment. The main benefit of this type of deployment is enabling high levels of control over what is running as well as management.

The solution is also easily integrated with pre-packed services like Amazon EMR and Savvis Big Data Foundation Services to reduce deployment complexity and provide mid-level control over installed services.

The market for big data and its associated services represents an enormous opportunity, and as the IaaS landscape explodes, that opportunity grows. IDC forecasts the market will reach $32.4 billion by 2017, growing at a healthy 27 percent CAGR.  That’s around six times the growth rate of the general ICT market.

Big data is definitely a theme for Qubole, and last month the company announced a partnership with Concurrent, Inc. enabling users of that company’s Cascade big data application platform to easily deploy apps at scale on a cloud platform. The partnership integrates the Qubole Data Service to offer fast and scalable infrastructure in the cloud for big data applications.

"With an unparalleled understanding of the cloud, Qubole is addressing today's challenges of storing and managing data to create a fast, easy and reliable path to turning big data into business insight,” said Ashish Thusoo, CEO of Qubole. “Together, Cascading and Qubole enhance developer productivity and provide operational value by helping customers build big data applications and derive insights without Hadoop expertise."