The new Brocade Ethernet fabric delivers high-performance data throughput for Apache Hadoop
Yahoo Japan Corporation has completed deployment of a Brocade Ethernet fabric solution as the network foundation for an enterprise-wide big data project announced the press release. The new Brocade Ethernet fabric is now delivering high-performance data throughput for Apache Hadoop, while cutting operational costs in half compared to the prior infrastructure.
Big data is a key strategic initiative at Yahoo Japan. The project was implemented to help the company maintain its innovation leadership in providing Internet services to users. Hadoop is used to analyze vast amounts of information obtained from its portal site and leverages such data for improving the quality of Yahoo Japan’s services, as well as creating new services. Hadoop is also used to support e-commerce and to enable millions of daily personalized and relevant content recommendations for the company’s user base.
At Yahoo Japan, Brocade VDX Ethernet Fabric modular and fixed-port network switches replaced a legacy Spanning Tree Protocol-based network. The new automated network infrastructure connects hundreds of servers supporting thousands of nodes dedicated to supporting Hadoop analysts across the entire enterprise.
As the demand and perceived value for big data analysis significantly grew within the organization, Yahoo Japan quickly recognized it needed to build a new, larger Hadoop infrastructure that could be shared across the entire organization. It also became immediately apparent that the legacy network wasn’t suitable for the new Hadoop design, because of limitations in data throughput, the inability to easily add capacity and increasing operational complexities that combined to put application performance and availability at risk.