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HPE Data Fabric

Score9.4 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

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What is HPE Data Fabric?

HPE Data Fabric (formerly MapR, acquired by HPE in 2019) is a software-defined datastore and file system that simplifies data management and analytics by unifying data across core, edge, and multicloud sources into a single platform.

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Reviews

What users are saying about HPE Data Fabric.
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MapR Beginner Review

Incentivized
Chavez KattickView profile
Software Engineer in Engineering at Tata Consultancy Services (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • MapR allows easy integration with HBase and MapR DB.
  • Easy trial server setup for product testing.
  • Excellent training program to help new users get up-to-date with MapR and related products.

Cons

  • HBase training needs to have more materials that are questioned in the HBase certification.

Return on Investment

  • We've been able to produce a solution with Hive and MapR

Other Software Used

Apache Spark, STORM, Apache Pig

MapR Makes it Easy

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • MapR is fast. We were able to beat the Terasort in record in 2012 on 360 nodes during the initial deployment of a cluster that is now 4000 nodes.
  • MapR is reliable. We rarely if ever have problems deploying MapR. It's the kind of software that "just works."
  • MapR scales. We have a client using MapR in all their big data clusters, ranging from 50 to 630 machines. Test, development, and production all deploy MapR.

Cons

  • I think MapR's main problem is name recognition. Hortonworks and Cloudera both are big names in the industry, but their deployment mechanisms are a little more difficult to use, especially when trying to fully automate it's deployment.
  • Documentation could always be better. But really, if that's your main weakness, it's everybody's weakness.

Return on Investment

  • Increased employee efficiency for sure. Our clients have various levels of expertise in their deployment and user teams, and we never receive complaints about MapR.
  • MapR is used by one of our financial services clients who uses it for fraud detection and user pattern analysis. They are able to turn around data much faster than they previously had with in-house applications

Other Software Used

Cloudera Enterprise, Hortonworks Data Platform, DataStax

Comparison of MapR versus other Hadoop distributions

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • MapR had very fast I/O throughput. The write speed was several times faster than what we could achieve with the other Hadoop vendors (Cloudera and Hortonworks). This is because MapR does not use HDFS, which is essentially a "meta filesystem". HDFS is built on top of the filesystem provided by the OS. MapR has their filesystem called MapR-FS, which is a true filesystem and accesses the raw disk drives.
  • The MapR filesystem is very easy to integrate with other Linux filesystems. When working with HDFS from Apache Hadoop, you usually have to use either the HDFS API or various Hadoop/HDFS command line utilities to interact with HDFS. You cannot use command line utilities native to the host operation system, which is usually Linux. At least, it is not easily done without setting up NFS, gateways, etc. With MapR-FS, you can mount the filesystem within Linux and use the standard Unix commands to manipulate files.
  • The HBase distribution provided by MapR is very similar to the Apache HBase distribution. Cloudera and Hortonworks add GUIs and other various tools on top of their HBase distributions. The MapR HBase distribution is very similar to the Apache distribution, which is nice if you are more accustomed to using Apache HBase.

Cons

  • The MapR web UI console is pretty basic. When you compare it to Cloudera Manager and Apache Ambari (ships with Hortonworks), it is definitely in third place. MapR has definitely invested heavily in file system performance with their MapR-FS, but they should invest a bit more in making it easier to administer and manage a MapR cluster.
  • MapR should tune their MapR-FS to work better with HBase. Once again, MapR-FS has invested heavily in their own proprietary technology such as the MapR-DB in this case. MapR-DB is a "wire compatible" version of HBase, but it is a bit of a different beast from HBase. What this means is that we ran into performance issues when running vanilla HBase on MapR-FS. Basically, the write throughput was so amazingly fast for the MapR-FS that it caused compaction storms with HBase. Slowing down the HBase flushes actually improved overall system throughput for HBase on MapR-FS.

Return on Investment

  • We were selling our Hadoop RDBMS as a traditional software product and there were several prospects who were interested because we supported MapR since MapR has a strong reputation for performance. I cannot comment on whether those deals were closed or not.

Other Software Used

Cloudera Enterprise, Hortonworks Data Platform

Mapr - a small review!

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Out of the box high availability on multiple Hadoop services, which will really bring enterprise standards. High availability of JobTracker, CLDB in Hadoop 1.x, HA for Impala services etc. Less headache for my team when it comes to service failure.
  • Performance enhancements when migrated from Hbase to Mapr Tables.
  • HDFS-NFS integration pioneer.
  • Volume concept of HDFS storage allocation which could be controlled from MCS GUI was great.

Cons

  • It takes time to get latest versions of Apache ecosystem tools released as it has to be adapted.
  • When you have issues related to Mapr-FS or Mapr Tables, its hard to figure them out by ourselves.
  • Sometime new ecosystem tools versions are released without proper QA.

Return on Investment

  • Less manual intervention for maintaining a cluster.

Other Software Used

Hortonworks Data Platform, Cloudera Enterprise