Intel launches big data software suite - free to a good home

Open source Intel Data Platform aiming to be the 'operating system' for big data

Intel has unveiled a suite of open-source software intended to provide a platform for big data analytics, with Hadoop - not surprisingly - at the core.

The Platform will help organisations to import, manage and analyse, and also features several new data processing capabilities including streaming data processing, interactive and iterative analytics, and graph processing that cannot be obtained from Hadoop alone.

Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Software Division, said that it would help ease the complexity of running big data environments.

"Much like an operating system for big data processing, the Intel Data Platform supports a wide variety of applications while providing improved security, reliability and peace of mind to customers using open source software," said Davis.

The toolkit provides a foundation of common algorithms, such as graphs and network-based clustering, that IT teams can build on and customise with domain-specific code, claimed Intel. The algorithms are easy to deploy, it adds, but broad enough to be applied to multiple industries, including financial services, healthcare and retail. The toolkit will also provide a development framework for unifying graph analytics and classical machine learning to ease the programming effort.

The Platform is currently in beta and will be fully released by the end of the second quarter in June.

The company says that it will come in two versions. An enterprise edition will be free, but organisations will be left to support it themselves. The premium edition will be available on a subscription basis and will include enhanced automation, proactive security fixes, and technical support, according to Intel.