Hadoop has once again emerged as the flavor of the week for the industry after Cisco Systems Inc. pulled the curtains back on new solutions in its Unified Computing System (UCS) family of converged infrastructure solution that take aim at the core challenges of deploying the analytics framework in enterprise environments.

The new additions to the roster include a set of blade and rack servers that incorporate the latest Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor architecture from Intel Corp. to help customers better support performance-intensive workloads such as batch processing, which Hadoop does best. The machines are joined by a new product dubbed UCS Director Express for Big Data that Cisco says can reduce the amount of manual work involved in setting up clusters running the open-source software, a notoriously complicated task.

The configuration tool works with major open-source distributions, meaning the Hortonworks Data Platform, MapR, and Cloudera.

The Tokyo-based Dentsu Razorfish Inc. is a joint venture between advertising titans Dentsu Inc. and  Razorfish that provides solutions for understanding and reaching out to consumers.  Data is the new competitive advantage in digital marketing where big data plays a vital mission critical role.  MapR revealed last Thursday that Dentsu Razorfish is leveraging its Hadoop distribution to power an internal “data lake” used to combine information from multiple sources for a complete view of complex subjects such as customer sentiment and brand awareness.

The same day MapR announced its latest customer win, GoodData Inc. revealed that it too has landed a major client in Japan. The startup offers a cloud-based environment for processing large volumes of unstructured data that provides integration with Hadoop and a number of other popular on-premise systems. The service has been selected by electronics giant Pioneer Corp.  as the foundation for an upcoming portfolio of analytics services that will be aimed at helping automobile manufacturers  and their partners exploit sensory data from their vehicles for value-added offerings such as proactive maintenance.

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