MapR Technologies, the provider of Hadoop technology for Big Data deployments, has announced that IDEXX Laboratories, Inc., a provider of diagnostics and information technology solutions for animal health, is now using the MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop via Amazon Web Services (AWS) – to scale its business at lower cost.
IDEXX Laboratories, headquartered in Maine, employs approximately 5,500 people and offers products to customers in more than 175 countries. The company delivers pet healthcare innovation, serving practicing veterinarians around the world with a broad range of diagnostic and information technology-based products and services.
AWS and Java 7
As the IDEXX businesses continued to grow, its primary data store, a relational database hosted on the cloud hosting infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), could not keep pace. The growing size of this database meant that daily jobs to aggregate and summarize data were taking too long to run and consuming database resources that were impacting online operations.
“We needed a solution which could offload this processing, easily scale to support the growth of the existing product and could be leveraged for future data intensive projects,” said Terry Schutte, IDEXX senior systems administrator for software R&D.
The new solution had to be compatible with existing systems, which included the AWS cloud hosting infrastructure and Java 7. “Our primary reason for choosing MapR M3 on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) was the ability to run Hadoop under Java 7 against Java 7 compiled applications,” said Schutte. “It was hard to find support for Java 7 in the MapReduce ecosystem. MapR’s performance and architectural improvements stood out.”
Run queries, get answers fast
“By running MapR clusters on EC2, we retain full control over the configuration and operations of the MapR cluster, while continuing to have the benefits of EC2 cloud hosting which means no capital expenditures and the flexibility to scale our environment based on demand,” Schutte added. “We pay only for capacity that we use and it lets us easily scale to support growth of the business.”
The new MapR/AWS solution would dramatically improve the company’s ability to respond to customer requests. “Before, we would have to schedule developer time to write a query to see if we even have data – the whole process could take months,” said Schutte. “Being able to scale the environment quickly and cost effectively helps us turn around answers to our customers’ questions much faster. Today we can cut through our data and run queries using MapReduce and get the answer in a day, or even hours.”
