There were a few major developments this week, three of which were product launches. The most significant of these may have been Pervasive’s DataRush debut, a software solution that could help enterprise boost Hadoop efficient for a reasonable price.

On its own Hadoop skirts 20 percent server utilization.  This is extremely low in comparison to the excess of 50 and 60 percent that can be achieved with virtualization. Users have the option of amending this by using vSphere, but right now one license is required per node – an expense that not many enterprises are willing to accommodate.  This week, however, Pervasive Software introduced a second alternative.

The developer announced a new product based on DataRush, an engine it developed to boost CPU utilization with a parallel architecture.  Pervasive says that in conjunction with another solution, the RushAnalzyer preprocessing accelerator, DataRush can realize server utilization of 80 percent while reducing the time it takes to process Hadoop jobs at the same time.

Over at Google, BigQuery received an upgrade that will make it viable for more traditional uses. The search giant’s cloud-powered analytics solution now features batch processing capabilities which are available for a lower rate than real-time queries, and support for Excel has been added as well.

IBM is also making sure that it’s not staying behind the curve when it comes to big data. The newly debuted zEC12 mainframe, sporting the speediest microprocessor in the world, comes with built in software that spots infrastructure performance patterns and identified anomalies. Big Blue also says that the z System can handle analytical workloads 30 percent better than the previous generation mainframe.

Last but not least, Fujitsu and the Cloud Security Alliance announced this week the foundation of the Big Data Working Group. The joint venture will focus on established industry best practices for security and privacy enforcement.