The idea of Hadoop always sounds so cool. Distributed computing, big data – it’s like this imaginary sweets shop with candy canes floating amid puffy clouds.

Not really. But the dream of Hadoop is far more talked about than the reality of what it takes to actually deploy and manage. It’s complicated. Due to this, eduction services to help implement Hadoop play a big part in the business models for Cloudera and newcomers like the Yahoo spinoff – Hortonworks.

Radoop looks like it helps take Hadoop out of dreamland.  It is designed with a user interface in mind for big data analytics and machine learning over Hadoop. It is still in early beta. You can request an invite here.

It’s similar to the interface we see from services such as Yahoo Pipes, which provides a UI for visualizing data connections and filtering terms for pinpointed searches. Yahoo Pipes aggregates data, mashing it up from around the Web.

Hadoop lacks an easy-to-use graphical interface. Radoop provides that interface by combining Hadoop with RapidMiner, an open-source tool for data mining. The Radoop site states that RapidMiner is an excellent tool for data analytics, but its data size is limited by the memory available, and a single machine is often not enough to run the analyses on time. By combining the tools, Radoop helps ease some of the complexity that has come with the lak of a user interface.  To further optimize it, Radoop integrates the data analytics capabilities of Hive and Mahout.

Services Angle

New technologies always face the obstacle of accessibility. Think of the most simple of applications such as email programs. In its earliest days, email floated in the mind’s sky with all kinds of dreamy thoughts about what it could be. But the UI was archaic by today’s standards. And the actual number of people who uses it were few.

The same is true for Hadoop. There’s pretty much no easy UI for Hadoop. The capability to configure, deploy and manage it requires a lot of training. That’s an opportunity for services providers. But even for the services people, there is a need for a better UI. For that reason, tools like Radoop will be important for services professionals as they educate the growing legions interested in big data.