Red Hat + DataStax: A partnership to dominate the Cloud-Based Analytics Business

by Marcos Ortiz

Could you imagine a world where Thomas Cameron (Chief Architect, Canada and Central US at Red Hat) and Martin Van Ryswyk (EVP of Engineering at DataStax) make a webinar how to deploy a secure DataStax Enterprise Edition cluster in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7)? Or, could you imagine a world where Robin Schumacher (VP of Products at DataStax) and Blake Eggleston, Senior Architect at SHIFT make a joint presentation in the next Red Hat Summit or the upcoming Cassandra Summit 2014 about JVM Optimizations and considerations for Cassandra deployments in RHEL7? These two ideas could be just the beginning of a partnership between DataStax and Red Hat. Why? Keep reading

First, a primer about Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise Edition

If you are connected in some way to the tech world, and you have heard about words like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Data Analysis and Open Source; you’ve seen or heard what is Apache Cassandra. From its official documentation:

Apache Cassandra is a highly available, incrementally scalable, eventually consistent, distributed database, bringing together Amazon Dynamo’s fully distributed design and Google Bigtable’s Column Family-based data model

and for its mutiple features is being used by companies like Netflix, Sony, Activision, Intuit, eBay and more (If you want to see all these companies in action, I encourage you again that you must participate in the upcoming Cassandra Summit 2014).

Jonathan Ellis ( who is the current Apache Cassandra Project Chair and CTO at DataStax) saw the many opportunities that Cassandra could become in the future and founded DataStax (formerly called Riptano). But, united to their amazing Engineering team, he wanted to offer something more interesting for the Enterprise, and after many hours of brainstorming and development, DataStax Enterprise Edition (DSE) came to light. DSE unites three of the most used Open Source projects sponsored by the Apache Software Foundation: Cassandra, used for Real-Time data management, Apache Hadoop, used for batch analysis and Apache Solr, used for Enterprise search operations, and all this could be managed from a single visual, browser-based administration tool called OpsCenter Enterprise.

When DataStax released the version 3.0 of DSE, I wrote a post about it. The current release of DSE is the 4.5 and you can download it here. If you want to know more about this release, I encourage you that you should wait for the next webinar with Martin and Robin called Buckle Up: The Future of the Distributed Database is Here on July 10th.

Now about RHEL

Like I explained in my post about the beta release of RHEL7, I’m a proud Linux user and Open Source advocate since 2006. Like I’m a big fan of the optimization, I have the chance to test a lot of Linux distributions looking for the “Holy Grail”, even I used Gentoo, which I learned a lot about kernel patches, sofwware compilations based in your architecture, kernel compilations with only your required kernel modules, the insanity of “make world” and many other good things. After that I found Fedora Linux, the Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat, which is the base of development of RHEL and I never came back. Then, I began to hear more and more times the Red Hat name in almost every large Open Source development project.

Then, I had the pleasure to work like System Engineer managing a large Red Hat cluster, and when you see the level of innovation which is inside the code and tools in RHEL, you simply says one word: WOW !!!. This is one of the reason why leaders in IT management declared the new release of RHEL 7 like the Future of the Enterprise Operating System:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a foundational operating system for an open hybrid cloud. The new capabilities and opportunities presented by Red Hat enterprise Linux 7 make the joint solutions delivered by Red Hat and Cisco even more compelling. Customers are increasingly adopting open, programmable infrastructure solutions built around the Cisco Unified Computing System. Paired with Cisco UCS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 platform enables easily deployable, end-to-end cloud solutions with the flexibility, scalability and stability to drive the datacenters of today and tomorrow

said Satinder Sethi, Vice President, Engineering at Cisco.

So, if these companies are innovating in almost every release that they do in their respective products, why not to join this success and work together for the Enterprise world? I will let you my reasons here why they should be partners.

They love Open Source

Both companies embrace Open Source like the main reason for their respective core businesses, so they have a lot in common, and this could bring to both organizations a lot of Enterprise customers interested in the hosting of Cloud-Based apps for Big Data analytics.

For example, Red Hat could work with DataStax to prepare a cartridge focused in Cassandra deployments in OpenShift thinking always in the Auto-scaling feature from the PaaS. Thanks to Diego Ferreira (DataStax Sales division in EMEA region) and Patrick McFadin (Chief Evangelist at DataStax), I found at GitHub a cartridge for this, so both Engineering teams could work together to become this in a good product.

Cassandra + RHEL7 in the LATAM region

Another good point to discuss here is the expansion that DataStax wants to achieve in the Latin American region , mainly in Hispanic contries where Cassandra is having a very good attention. With the strong presence of Red Hat in the region (Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Argentina like main countries), they could work together to spread the word about the benefits to deploy Cassandra in RHEL7, making blog posts, webinars, Google hangouts, presentations in Spanish and Portuguese, focused in Latin tech hubs like Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Mexico DF.

Following the idea that Patrick said me to become in a “Virtual Evangelist in Spanish for Cassandra”, I could help on this, maintaining a kind of “Planet Cassandra” in Spanish, collecting all content in Spanish about Cassandra, writing posts, anyway, spreading the word about the platform in the LATAM region.

Final Thoughts

So, the benefits are there. For these reasons, I think that Jim and Bill should talk very seriously about these ideas. Like always do, I will put here my favourite positions at Red Hat and DataStax that could help you to make this alliance come true between them:

Good luck !!!

@marcosluis2186