UPDATED 03:24 EDT / MARCH 28 2016

NEWS

Galactic Exchange can get your Hadoop cluster up and running in just 5 minutes

Stealthy startup Galactic Exchange Inc. burst out of the shadows this weekend touting a new product that’s able to spin up an Hadoop or Spark cluster, ready to go, in just five minutes. By doing so, it eliminates much of the complexity from what has traditionally been an extremely complex job.

Galactic Exchange is set to release a beta of its product, called ClusterGX, later this week at the Strata+HadoopWorld event in San Jose. ClusterGX is designed to work on all major operating systems, including Linux, Windows and Mac OS, and can be installed in minutes even by those with no previous experience in building clusters, Hadoop or Spark.

Even better, ClusterGX is an open-source tool which means it’s entirely free to use, with Galactic Exchange even picking up the tab for the cloud infrastructure required to host it and your data.

“We take simplicity and ease of use to a whole new level,” said Rob Mustarde, co-founder and CEO of Galactic Exchange. “If you can install a smartphone app, you can install ClusterGX.”

Of course, Galactic Exchange does want to make money, and so the plan is for an enhanced enterprise edition of ClusterGX to be rolled out at a later date, complete with enterprise-grade support and additional features.

Mustarde told TechCrunch that ClusterGX is specifically targeted at smaller businesses that can’t afford to pay for the specialist talent and infrastructure required to get Hadoop clusters up and running the traditional way.

Later, the company wants to expand beyond just Hadoop and Spark clusters to incorporate other popular Big Data technologies as well. The long-term plan is that “all of your applications and compute and virtualized storage [can] work together in a hyper-converged environment,” Mustarde explained.

ClusterGX is built around Apache Mesos and Docker Inc.’s container technology, which helps to speed up the setup process and allows better sharing of cluster compute resources across all containers. In other words, any application running inside a ClusterGX cluster can be hosted in its own container, allowing companies to consolidate all of their apps and services inside a single cluster.

Mustarde said that ClusterGX was purposely built on container technology because he believes it provides them with an incredible opportunity for growth.

“We can deliver a hyperconvergence platform to provide enhanced application performance and redundancy/back-up, reduced complexity, centralized cloud based management, as well as huge cost savings from increased server utilization efficiencies and reduced server sprawl,” he explained.

That view was shared by Mike Matchett, Senior Analyst at Taneja Group, who said the company should benefit enormously from the flexibility and agility provided by Docker’s container architecture. This should also help ClusterGX to accelerate customer adoption of Hadoop and Spark, because by moving Hadoop/Spark management into the cloud, it vastly simplifies the job of getting these systems up and running.

“They are essentially unlocking the opportunity for many more businesses to take easy advantage of new analysis solutions, data lakes, and even IoT opportunities,” Matchett said. “We view this smart cloud-centered management approach as a very positive trend which we are starting to also see in a number of other areas.”

Be sure to check out Galactic Exchange at Strata+Hadoop World in the Innovators Pavilion, booth P5, from March 29 to March 31.

Image credit: Mysticsartdesign via pixabay.com

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