HANA has her sisters: GridGain and ScaleOut bring in-memory to Hadoop

[Palmira Kostka]

SAP's HANA gets a lot of attention, but it's not the only in-memory game in town.  GridGain today announced the release of its in-memory stack, coming only two weeks after the release of ScaleOut Software's hServer in-memory data grid v2.

By combining in-memory databases with grid infrastructure, both companies' products offer the ability to use memory to process data more quickly.  GridGain and ScaleOut's technology can also both be used as accelerators for Hadoop, by providing custom readers and writers.  This allows MapReduce code to execute over in-memory data, rather than data stored in Hadoop's Distributed File System (HDFS).  And unlike HDFS, data in these in-memory stores are updatable.