Pepperdata Differentiates and Diversifies with SLA Enforcement, Capacity Gains, and Comprehensive Chargeback

Last week, 451 Research published an Impact Report on Pepperdata, the second they have published on our company this year. In January, 451 Research analyst Matt Aslett predicted that market need for mixed-workload Hadoop clusters held hope for Pepperdata’s growth, as more and more Enterprises would require this capability as Hadoop adoption grew in Enterprise production environments. You can read the report here (note this requires a 451 log-in).

Fast forward less than one year, and Mr. Aslett has been proven right. Pepperdata has seen a number of new companies come onboard this year (several Fortune 500, as a matter of fact) due to their need to guarantee SLAs and maximize performance in Hadoop environments. Not only have customers been paying more attention, but analysts as well, as coverage of Pepperdata has grown steadily since the summer.
This latest Impact Report from 451 covers the growth Pepperdata has seen in 2015, hiring more employees on the Engineering, Sales, and Marketing side. In addition, the increase in number of new customers and the new features added, such as our Comprehensive Chargeback Reporting. Access to the full report requires a 451 Research log-in, but a summation of some of the major points below:

Hadoop as a platform has expanded and evolved since its first iteration. Initially starting out with MapReduce there is now YARN, as well as a number of SQL on Hadoop tools. Spark and other processing engines are also taking off. The Hadoop platform now enables a variety of workloads and processing methods, which lead to potential inefficiencies that can occur within a cluster. At some point, Pepperdata believes, without some optimization efforts, clusters experience what the company calls the ‘ceiling of adoption’ – the point at which a cluster reaches its efficiency capacity. Growing beyond this ‘ceiling’ is precisely where the company sees its primary benefit….Even though some cluster optimization & management capabilities are offered by the Hadoop vendors – Ambari and Cloudera Manager, for instance – Pepperdata believes it is differentiated by its ability to monitor and optimize at a much more granular level, for instance at the individual job and task level.

The analyst, James Curtis, has grasped what Pepperdata does differently from other monitoring tools – it is our granular visibility in real time that differentiates us, but more than that the ability to actively control cluster utilization and optimize based on actual resource consumption is where we (and our customers) see the most benefit. Organizations are able to set policies and priorities for which jobs should be “protected”, and those jobs are given almost an “emergency lane” to get through the cluster traffic. As James points out, this is our true value proposition and as organizations start to use Hadoop for mission-critical jobs and applications, this is where we shine.