Hortonworks Announces Sandbox Learning Environment

Hortonworks announces Hortonworks Sandbox, a hands-on environment for learning, testing, and using Apache Hadoop in the enterprise. According to the company, the easy-to-use Sandbox allows users to set up a small Hadoop cluster with an integrated environment where they can access demos, videos, and step-by-step tutorials. Additionally, the tool's web interface has been designed to lower the learning curve for people who want to explore and evaluate Hadoop quickly and easily.

The integrated learning tutorials have been developed based on the experience of the Hortonworks training team in teaching students how to develop and administer Apache Hadoop. These learning materials will be regularly updated by the Hortonworks team to provide new content and increasingly sophisticated tutorials. Additionally, users can upload their own datasets to test Apache Hadoop within their own data architectures.

Hortonworks Sandbox is a single node implementation of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.2 that lets users investigate and evaluate Apache Hadoop projects, such as Apache Pig, Apache Hive, Apache HCatalog, and Apache HBase, in an isolated protected environment. You can download Hortonworks Sandbox for free from http://hortonworks.com/community/virtual-sandbox-2/]

ObjectRocket Offers MongoDB Cloud Service

ObjectRocket announced a new MongoDB cloud service. According to the company, the MongoDB database-as-a-service (DBaaS) has been built from the ground up to provide a fast and scalable MongoDB environment. ObjectRocket's architecture uses a modular approach for easy scalability and availability for MongoDB. When an instance is created, all required components are automatically provisioned. Each instance comprises at least one shard (or node), a master, and at least one secondary; additional shards can be added with a single click.

ObjectRocket's service also includes premium software features, such as: RocketScale, which provides fast and easy scaling; QueryGuard, for automatic detection of long-running queries; and RocketSecure, for added security of encrypted connections and IP-based access control. According to the company, ObjectRocket provides "blazingly" fast performance for MongoDB. All instances include numerous performance enhancements, run at bare-metal speed, and are built on solid state disk.

ObjectRocket offers the MongoDB DBaaS solution starting at US$ 29/month/instance along with 24/7 customer support. Instances are available now. For more information on pricing and features, please visit: http://objectrocket.com/pricing.

LaCie Announces 5big RAID Solution

LaCie has announced the 5big Thunderbolt Series, a massive new five-bay RAID solution. With five 7200rpm/64MB cache hard disks preconfigured in RAID 0, the LaCie 5big offers capacity up to 20TB and speeds up to 785MB/s. The LaCie 5big lets users create custom RAID configurations. According to the announcement, users can create a lightning-fast volume with three disks in RAID 0 and a safe volume with two disks in RAID 1. The disks are hot-swappable, so they can be replaced without switching off the device. Additionally, the LaCie 5big can be used as a JBOD array.

Also, according to the company, the LaCie 5big's advanced dual cooling system ensures long-term reliability. This "ultra-quiet" cooling system consists of three key components: an innovative heat-dissipating aluminum casing, a Noctua cooling fan, and jumbo heat exhausts.

The LaCie 5big is available now starting at US$ 1,199 for the 10TB model and US$ 2,199 for the 20TB model. It is protected by a three-year limited warranty, which includes web-based resources, in-house technical support, and repair/replacement. See http://www.lacie.com]for more.