At RSA Conference 2013 in San Francisco, Virtustream announced it has partnered with Metamarkets and Skilled Analysts to offer big data solutions in the cloud.


There is a significant and growing demand for real-time analytics across the large volumes of business information today. Many organizations are experimenting with open source big data tools, but find that setup requires specialized skills.

Through the combination of Virtustream’s secure enterprise class cloud, Metamarkets’ Druid real-time analytics database and Skilled Analysts’ consulting services, enterprises now have access to tailored big data solutions that can be run on demand from any cloud – private public or hybrid, with professional services as needed. Running Druid in the cloud simplifies setup and expedites deployment, which in turn improves time to value.

Powered by Virtustream µVMTM (micro-VM) technology, xStream offers a pay-as-you-go cloud service that only charges customers for the resources actually used. With big data projects that require a significant amount of storage and compute, consumption-based pricing delivers significant cost savings to customers.

Metamarkets created Druid, a real-time analytics database, which is the first open source, distributed, analytical data store designed to operate in real-time and scale horizontally. Druid is perfectly suited for large-scale, real-time data analysis of massive volumes of business data.

“Setting up the required hardware and big data software has been a formidable challenge for many firms. Having these systems already deployed at Virtustream and only being billed for actual usage makes the whole process much simpler,” said David Park, chief technology officer at Skilled Analysts. “We’ve found Druid to be an extremely powerful tool that can analyze large incoming data streams in close to real time.”

To assist enterprises with the installation, configuration and use of big data tools, Skilled Analysts offers data scientists with extensive design and implementation expertise to establish and run Druid and Hadoop projects.

To illustrate the power of big data, the companies have provided two demonstrations (registration required). The first demo takes the live data from parking meters in San Francisco and provides a street map to the nearest empty parking space. This demonstrates real-time analysis using the power of the Druid in-memory database, which is used across vertical industries, to analyze massive amounts of big data.

The second example takes very large U.S. census datasets and provides a fast Hadoop search of the changing dynamics of the U.S., showing demographics, age, state and distribution across massive scale. The power of Hadoop with such large datasets has been used to detect lucrative market segments, analyze medical/pharmaceutical data and even political campaigns to tailor messages to specific constituencies.