Illustration by Michael Capozzola

The OReilly Strata Conference was this week’s big data epicenter.  Several noteworthy companies attended the gathering, a few of them launched new Hadoop distributions, and many others announced specialized solutions designed to either run or supplement all this new software.

Cloudera unveiled a new version of its flagship enterprise management suite, Cloudera Enterprise. The bundle ships with the company’s distribution, the latest release of its admin platform, a data management layer, and backup and recovery solution that eliminates the need to use a third party solution. The latter two additions make the offering more viable for large enterprise customers that prioritize availability and security.

EMC Greenplum also launched a new Hadoop distro, its fourth to date. Named Pivotal HD, the near real-time analytics engine works a lot like Hadapt and Cloudera’s open-source Impala, only “orders of magnitude” faster. The heart of the offering is HAQW, a database that integrates SQL with NoSQL.

The third firm that introduced its own flavor of Hadoop at the gathering is none other than Intel.  theCube caught up with vice president of marketing Boyd Davis to discuss his company’s surprise announcement, and what sets it apart from other Hadoop solutions (full video below).

DataDirect Networks also made a splash at Strata when it debuted hScaler, a Hadoop appliance that takes advantage of sophisticated software to eliminate bottlenecks and increase throughput by a great margin  Wikibon’s Dave Floyer explained the significance of this feature and elaborated on why hScaler is better than commodity clusters that don’t feature automated error management.

On the same day DDN unveiled its new hardware, SAP picked up SmartsOps. The Pittsburgh-based firm develops predictive analytics software that helps companies understand the chain and operate more efficiency.

Intel’s Hadoop Play is about Security, Standardization [Exclusive Interview]