Cloudera Data Science Workbench vs. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric (MapR)

Organizations which already implemented on-premise Hadoop based Cloudera Data Platform (CDH) for their Big Data warehouse architecture will definitely get more value from seamless integration of Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) with their existing CDH Platform. However, for organizations with hybrid (cloud and on-premise) data platform without prior implementation of CDH, implementing CDSW can be a challenge technically and financially.

Incentivized

MapR is more well-suited for people who know what they are doing. I consider MapR the Hadoop distribution professionals use.

Incentivized

• One single IDE (browser based application) that makes Scala, R, Python integrated under one tool
• For larger organizations/teams, it lets you be self reliant
• As it sits on your cluster, it has very easy access of all the data on the HDFS
• Linking with Github is a very good way to keep the code versions intact

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Installation is difficult.
• Upgrades are difficult.
• Licensing options are not flexible.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Cloudera Data Science Workbench has excellence online resources support such as documentation and examples. On top of that the enterprise license also comes with SLA on opening a ticket to Cloudera Services and support for complaint handling and troubleshooting by email or through a phone call. On top of that it also offers additional paid training services.

Incentivized

Both the tools have similar features and have made it pretty easy to install/deploy/use. Depending on your existing platform (Cloudera vs. Azure) you need to pick the Workbench. Another observation is that Cloudera has better support where you can get feedback on your questions pretty fast (unlike MS). As its a new product, I expect MS to be more efficient in handling customers questions.

Incentivized

I don't believe there is as much support for MapR yet compared to other more widely known products.

Incentivized

• Paid off for demonstration purposes.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized