Rackspace CEO Lanhan Napier

Rackspace Inc., burst into the Strata + Hadoop World conference yesterday with a unique solution to a Big Data problem an announcement that could massively impact Big Data. It’s just launched a new solution called the OnMetal Cloud Big Data Platform that gives enterprises bare-metal access to Hadoop clusters in public clouds.

Running Hadoop in the public cloud is no easy feat, even if Hortonworks Inc., begs to differ with its “four steps” guide to setting up Hadoop on Amazon Web Services (the four steps consume 46 screen shots). Installation and maintenance become major headaches for administrators, and the costs may end up outweighing the benefits.

Now Rackspace is hoping to change that. The solution was detailed in a blog post by the company’s chief technical officer John Engates on Wednesday, who wrote that “queries can potentially be run in half the time using our OnMetal offering.”

Rackspace launched its OnMetal Servers back in June. Based on the OpenStack platform and built using specifications from Facebook’s Open Compute Project, they can be automatically provisioned in the same way as public virtual machines. The OnMetal Cloud Big Data Platform essentially adds a new tier to this offering, one that’s customized for Hadoop and the Apache Spark data processing engine.

Now customers can deploy bare-metal instances of Hadoop with Spark in just three clicks, Rackspace claims, providing “an efficient and elastic platform that delivers break-\through speed, allowing data scientists to gather insights in minutes rather than hours or days.”

Rackspace says the single-tenant nature of the OnMetal Cloud Big Data Platform makes it especially useful to organizations that can’t deploy data on multi-tenant cloud systems for compliance or regulatory reasons. These users are often restricted to on-premise deployments.

“Enterprises are showing increasing interest in the value provided by the large-scale data processing that Hadoop and Spark can provide, but can be wary of the upfront cost and complexity of setting up a cluster to prove that value,” said Matt Aslett, research director, data platforms and analytics at 451 Research, quoted in a Rackspace press release. “Managed services such as this enable enterprises to focus their energies on generating business insights rather than configuring and managing infrastructure.”

Rackspace’s OnMetal Cloud Big Data is available to North American customers now on a 95-day free trial basis. International availability will follow by the end of this year.

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