IBM Analytics for Apache Spark Available on Bluemix
IBM Cloud Data Services announced that IBM Analytics for Apache Spark, a highly reliable and easy-to-use managed Spark service, is available on IBM Bluemix.
The Spark service offers new levels of flexibility and access for data professionals and line of business stakeholders to rapidly analyze large data sets and uncover new insights to transform their industries.
Apache Spark is well known for its speed (in-memory processing provides speed up to 100 times faster than other big data technologies), ease of integration, and flexibility to run in a variety of programming environments.
Rapid, cost-effective access to Spark
Now as a fully managed service, IBM is making it possible for data scientists, data engineers, business analysts, and developers to build quickly and iterate faster to meet the changing needs of their business without the burden of setting up and maintaining their own Spark environment. In addition, this cloud-based service provides cost-effective access to Spark capabilities in an on-demand model where you pay only for what you use and scale as you grow.
IBM Analytics for Apache Spark offers the following benefits:
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Accessible & Simple: Provision a Spark instance in Bluemix in just minutes and jump right into an integrated notebook. Notebooks provide an interactive computational environment to perform analytic tasks on data coming from diverse sources, and combines code execution, rich text, mathematics, plots and rich media together in one place. Start coding in Python, Scala, or Java, import a notebook, or use one of the sample notebooks provided
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Super Open and Integrated: Easily integrates with other managed cloud data and analytics services, and 3rd party tools on the rich, open, and expanding Bluemix platform. With a highly flexible environment, you can iterate faster, fail faster, and bring things to market faster
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Powerful: Our customers are performing deeper, richer, analytics, faster than they were using existing big data technologies. A great example of a company tapping the power of IBM Analytics for Apache Spark service is SolutionInc.
SolutionInc is an Internet gateway provider that offers on-premise and cloud-based solutions for managing high demand public Wi-Fi in hotels, conference centers, parks, and other public buildings in over 50 countries worldwide. The company knew there were insights buried in their mountains of data that could be used to benefit their clients. Working with IBM’s jStart team, they turned on the new Spark service and were uncovering information about their busiest access points and most frequent users in just a few weeks. Learn more about SolutionInc’s implementation in our IBM project lead’s overview SolutionInc: Generating Business Insights from Large Wi-Fi Datasets.
IBM sees Apache Spark as the analytics operating system of the future, and is making major contributions to Apache Spark technology. So far, IBM has hired hundreds of developers to actively work in the open source community at the Spark Technology Center in San Francisco; donated the machine learning platform, SystemML, to the Spark community; and committed to educate over 1 million data scientists on how to use Spark.
Try it yourself!
We invite you to try out the new Apache Spark service for yourself and let us know what you think.