1. ®
Silicon Valley icon Hewlett-Packard is in the midst of a turnaround aimed at shifting
the business to new growth areas. Faced with tough competition, HP’s new strategy is
focused on providing integrated solutions in cloud computing, security, Big Data, and
mobility.
HP needed to find the right technology and partner to build an infrastructure for its
internal Big Data development projects and to serve as the platform for new client offer-
ings. The company needed to ensure high availability across six data centers for mission-
critical applications.
Once HP decided to implement ApacheTM
Hadoop® in its Big Data, it implemented a com-
prehensive evaluation of Hadoop vendors.
“For everything we measured across the board—performance, high availability, disaster
recovery, manageability, knowledge base, future roadmap—MapR was the clear choice,”
said Keith Dornbusch, Manager of HP’s Big Data Services IT Team. “The MapR technology
was top-notch, particularly their performance and high availability features. Plus, our
working relationship with the vendor was excellent. MapR’s responsiveness, service, and
support, were second to none. And MapR addresses our long-term needs by being a reli-
able Hadoop distribution geared towards the enterprise.”
Building a ‘Data Lake’ platform for multiple uses
HP has established a new internal architecture and “data lake” environment based on
Hadoop and MapR. The data lake provides a common platform that holds all data derived
from different sources, such as customers, production, or finance. “The real value is break-
ing down silos and bringing the data together,” says Paul Westerman, Senior Director of
IT Big Data Solutions at HP. “With Hadoop, you can drop files in and the data is there. It’s
a different type of development environment.” HP deployed the Hadoop environment on
320 of HP’s DL380e servers that have Dual Intel ES-2440 processors. Each of these servers
provides approximately 20 terabytes of storage and 128 gigabytes of SD RAM, adding up
to an ideal environment for Big Data storage and processing.
By bringing all the data together, MapR is enabling HP to develop new solutions including:
Monitoring product quality through telemetry data
Being able to store and access a larger volume of data than previously, HP can offer
new services to improve customer experience and be more proactive about customer
service. “The most impressive MapR use case is about telemetry data,” explains Dorn-
busch. “This is the data that our machines create during the manufacturing process.
Once the product is in the customer’s hands, we can monitor how it is performing
and that data is sent back. We can determine whether a customer will have a problem
before it happens.”
Creating a better 360-degree customer experience
Another MapR solution strives to improve the overall HP customer experience by
combining data from across all HP divisions into one dashboard that includes all
interactions each customer has with the company. “The most important use case is
customer experience. This will be a game changer for HP,” says Westerman. “We will
be able to bring together all information about every place and time that HP touches
a customer. We will combine silos into one dashboard so we can provide a better
experience for our customers.”
The Business
The Challenge
MapR Solution
“The MapR technology
was top-notch,
particularly their
performance and high
availability features.
Plus, our working
relationship with the
vendor was excellent.”
Keith Dornbusch
Manager Big Data Services IT Team
Hewlett-Packard

2. ®www.mapr.com
Summary
HP’s MapR Big Data
platform has become
the launching point
for dozens of internal
solutions and customer
offerings. Across use
cases, HP is benefitting
from its MapR Big
Data solutions with
improved data
availability, scalability,
massive storage, cost
savings, and flexibility.
“MapR’s responsive-
ness, service, and sup-
port were second to
none. And MapR ad-
dresses our long-term
needs by being a reli-
able Hadoop distribu-
tion geared towards
the enterprise.”
Keith Dornbusch
Manager Big Data Services IT Team
Hewlett-Packard
Benefits
MapR Solution
(continued)
Being smarter about selling through the website
HP is also using MapR to get smarter about how it sells to customers through their
website. The click data portion of hp.com generates hundreds of billions of clicks.
“We are now able to store and use this data to improve a customer’s web experi-
ence. MapR and Hadoop are managing five petabytes of data on dual 46-node
clusters set up with 20 terabytes per node,” he says. “For example, having this data
allows us to customize an offer based on the person’s online behavior.”
There are also several other MapR solutions being used that collect and analyze data in
the areas of printer usage, security, and employee experience.
High availability
MapR’s high availability and disaster recovery features have been critical to HP.
“One of the key reasons we chose MapR was because of its high availability and disaster-
recovery capabilities,” says Dornbusch. “We have six data centers; if we lose one, it can fail
over to another. We require automatic failover between clusters.”
Flexible development environment
MapR’s NFS features are also very important to HP. “We use Hadoop to move data out
of flat files to use across platforms. We are able to get our data out of silos. Now we can
get to it and use it quickly,” explains Dornbusch. “Hadoop helps us with time-to-market
for our internal customers. We can have a platform space for our applications team
available almost immediately. We built a farm of servers so we can expand rapidly.”
Scalability
The MapR platform enables HP to plan for the future by knowing that they can harness
the explosion of data they are managing across their businesses. “We’re seeing the tip
of the iceberg with Big Data. For example, our Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) has
grown 50% per year for the past seven years. However, this past year alone, the amount
of data we are managing in just one implementation of HP Vertica Analytics Platform
and Hadoop is twice the volume as our EDW,” Dornbusch says.
Cost savings
One of the primary benefits of the MapR environment is cost savings. “MapR enables
massive storage at low cost,” he says. “We process billions of records per second. The
MapR technology enables us to maintain data that we couldn’t manage previously and
analyze that data quickly in ways we couldn’t do before.”
“There are specific benefits for each project. For example, in one analysis we conducted
on warranty data, there was a $10 million ROI because we did not pay claims that were
fraudulent,” explains Dornbusch.
MapR delivers on the promise of Hadoop with a proven, enterprise-grade platform that supports a broad set
of mission-critical and real-time production uses. MapR brings unprecedented dependability, ease-of-use and
world-record speed to Hadoop, NoSQL, database and streaming applications in one unified big data platform.
MapR is used by more than 500 customers across financial services, retail, media, healthcare, manufactur-
ing, telecommunications and government organizations as well as by leading Fortune 100 and Web 2.0
companies. Amazon, Cisco, Google and HP are part of the broad MapR partner ecosystem. Investors include
Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA, and Redpoint Ventures. MapR is based in San Jose, CA.
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