Hadoop is software package at prices so low that almost every company is able to afford it already
In the first part of my blog series I claimed that everyone can afford Big Data tools. The summary blog emphasized the license cost aspect and depicted how it does not exist. Like mentioned then this is not the whole truth. On the high level the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) includes the total cost of acquisition, the operating costs and the costs related to replacement or upgrades at the end of the life cycle.
Specialty of the Hadoop system is that the acquisition costs are significantly lower compared to a traditional commercial software as there is not a license cost. For developing an actual application to be run on the Hadoop platform you most probably need external help. Even though companies using Hadoop seem to have quite “do it yourself” attitude. And naturally the cost of internal resources is a cost too. In general the hourly price of an external project resource for developing a Hadoop application is comparable to the level of any other enterprise level technology.
So, what kind of operating costs you should consider. In practice you just pay for the server hosting and the maintenance/support subscription if you want to guarantee the continuity of the service you provide with it. I do not have any statistics, but the hosting costs are often lower than with a traditional software, especially if the commercial software requires a vendor specific appliances. The very natural place for a Hadoop clusters are the public clouds like Azure or AWS which are very reasonable priced. The on premise hosting by a local provider costs, for relatively small cluster (~10 servers), few thousands euros per a month which is very reasonable price. The costs increases naturally about linearly when you need more servers, but then you can expect also significant bay-back for the investment too.
As you move to the production usage, depending on the business criticality of your application, you most probably want to purchase a maintenance/support subscription. For example Hortonworks sells different SLA levels at a very reasonable price compared to a traditional commercial software. The company gets its revenue only from these services and mainly from the subscriptions. However, “Hortonworks is expected to become the fastest growing software company — reaching $100 million in annual revenue in just four years from inception”. This describes the value-add they provide and the global success of Hadoop.
As a summary the implementation of Hadoop and other open source software is not free, but TCO is very competitive. It is so competitive that almost every company is able to afford it already. Just download the software from the Hortonworks’ homepage or launch your first cluster with Azure trial account for free.
On next week in the part three I will talk about how Hadoop together with other open source big data projects provide a huge range of IT software for the areas of data management and system integration
If you want hear more about HDP Hadoop, Modern Data Architecture and Azure Marketplace you may like these blog-posts:
Tuomas Autio: In love with Hadoop deployment automation
Mikko Mattila: Hadoop – IKEA of the IT ecosystem: Part 1
Mikko Mattila: Hadoop – IKEA of the IT ecosystem: Part 3
Mikko Mattila: Hadoop – IKEA of the IT ecosystem: Part 4
