Founded by big data pioneers from Yahoo and Google, startup unveils cloud-based offering built specifically for Hadoop users.

Spotting an emerging marketplace for cloud-based Hadoop, Silicon Valley startup Altiscale has officially launched Altiscale Data Cloud, a Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) offering the corporate says is designed to free users from the complexities of deploying, managing, and scaling a giant data platform.

In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Altiscale CEO and cofounder Raymie Stata, formerly chief technical officer of Yahoo, said the hot service helps simplify Hadoop for corporations that lack the expertise or resources to run the massive data framework without outside help.

“We now have the world’s only purpose-built Hadoop cloud,” said Stata. “It is really Hadoop-as-a-service — not Hadoop as yet one more application slapped on top of a generic infrastructure-as-a-service.”

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At big companies like Yahoo and Google, large teams of well-trained experts keep Hadoop — or an analogous big data platform — up and running. “It’s run by a central team that not just keeps it running like clockwork, but additionally keeps it expanding because it is often growing,” Stata said. This group also keeps Hadoop modern, he added, since the software’s changing plenty.

Altiscale Data Cloud, however, is focused at businesses that lack the technical staff and infrastructure to control Hadoop all alone.

After founding Altiscale in 2011, Stata and his colleagues looked around at other Hadoop installations inside the wild and located lots of them lacking. “What we found was, they truly had subpar installations,” said Stata. “They were quite small — five, twenty, fifty nodes, maybe. They were run by people that maybe [spent] 1 / 4 in their time on Hadoop, but who had lots of other stuff to do.”

This wasn’t excellent news for business users hoping to glean actionable insights from those Hadoop installations. “They did not have a deep operations team,” Stata said. “To that end, the parents on top … were really sort of all alone with regards to getting probably the most out of Hadoop.”

The Altiscale founders spotted a market niche: Bringing a Yahoo-style Hadoop experience to business with fewer resources. “We saw a chance,” said Stata. “Let’s bring that awesome type of Ferrari of Hadoop to those users and provides them a pit crew to aid them navigate the track and win the race.”

The pit crew accordingly was Altiscale’s team of Hadoop veterans. “We’ve got a number of Hadoop expertise, so we offer numerous support for users to lead them to more desirable at using Hadoop,” Stata explained. Altiscale’s ability to put in, manage, and update a business’s Hadoop installation is a key distinction between it and other cloud-based providers, he added.

The company offers the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for storage. “As our customer, you get an HDFS volume, and you’ll store stuff in it for so long as you wish to have — from 10 terabytes to petabytes.”

“Backstage, there’s what we call auto-elasticity: If you would like more capacity because you’re storing more stuff or running bigger jobs, we manage that for you,” he said. “And we just charge you for the resources you’re using, the bytes you’re storing, and the compute time you’re consuming.”

The HaaS market continues to be largely untapped, because the company has only about ten customers at this point. “They’re mostly digital media, digital advertising, and SaaS companies — the standard Hadoop suspects,” said Stata. “In relation to storage, that is so they can size these folks, they [range] from just a few tens of terabytes as much as a number of hundreds of terabytes.”

Two Altiscale customers, he noted, aim to get to a petabyte of information by the tip of the year.

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