What I have seen companies do often is that they will use free version of the commercial vendor and only get their support if there are major problems that they cannot solve on their own.
That way you will get free distribution and insurance that you have support if something goes wrong. Serge On 2/23/12 10:42 AM, "Jamack, Peter" <pjam...@consilium1.com> wrote: >A lot of it depends on your staff and their experiences. >Maybe they don't have hadoop, but if they were involved with large >databases, data warehouse, etc they can utilize their skills & experiences >and provide a lot of help. >If you have linux admins, system admins, network admins with years of >experience, they will be a goldmine. At the other end, database >developers who know SQL, programmers who know Java, and so on can really >help staff up your 'big data' team. Having a few people who know ETL would >be great too. > > The biggest problem I've run into seems to be how big the Hadoop >project/team is or is not. Sometimes it's just an 'experimental' >department and therefore half the people are only 25-50 percent available >to help out. And if they aren't really that knowledgeable about hadoop, >it tends to be one of those, not enough time in the day scenarios. And >the few people dedicated to the Hadoop project(s) will get the brunt of >the work. > > It's like any ecosystem. To do it right, you might need system/network >admins, a storage person to actually know how to set up the proper storage >architecture, maybe a security expert, a few programmers, and a few data >people. If you're combining analytics, that's another group. Of course >most companies outside the Google and Facebooks of the world, will have a >few people dedicated to Hadoop. Which means you need somebody who knows >storage, knows networking, knows linux, knows how to be a system admin, >knows security, and maybe other things(AKA if you have a firewall issue, >somebody needs to figure out ways to make it work through or around), and >then you need some programmes who either know MapReduce or can pretty much >figure it out because they've done java for years. > >Peter J > >On 2/23/12 10:17 AM, "Pavel Frolov" <pfro...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>Hi, >> >>We are going into 24x7 production soon and we are considering whether we >>need vendor support or not. We use a free vendor distribution of Cluster >>Provisioning + Hadoop + HBase and looked at their Enterprise version but >>it >>is very expensive for the value it provides (additional functionality + >>support), given that we¹ve already ironed out many of our performance and >>tuning issues on our own and with generous help from the community (e.g. >>all of you). >> >>So, I wanted to run it through the community to see if anybody can share >>their experience of running a Hadoop cluster (50+ nodes with Apache >>releases or Vendor distributions) in production, with in-house support >>only, and how difficult it was. How many people were involved, etc.. >> >>Regards, >>Pavel >
