Galactic Exchange Closes Seed Financing Round for Its "Unreasonably Simple Clusters for Big Data"

MENLO PARK, CA--(Marketwired - August 29, 2016) - #GalacticExchange, Inc. today announced the closing of its seed financing round and also confirmed that the pre-release (beta) version of its flagship #ClusterGX™ product line would be available for general download at the end of September, to coincide with the O'Reilly #Strata + #Hadoop World event in New York. California based Galactic Exchange has been developing technology to hugely simplify the deployment of Hadoop / #Spark based infrastructures and associated analytics applications, both on-premise and in the cloud. "The open source software ecosystem surrounding #BigData is an impenetrable soup of complexity for most and so not surprisingly market forecasts show that services continue to demand the biggest percentage of all dollars spent," said Rob Mustarde, President & CEO of Galactic Exchange. "The enormous benefit that Big Data promises is closed to all but those with the most skilled and experienced IT staff, or those willing to pay large for outside help -- our vision is to change that." ClusterGX™ Community Edition will be free to download from the Galactic Exchange web site and will enable an organization to spin up Container virtualized Hadoop/Spark clusters in a matter of minutes with zero experience required. "There is an old adage often applied to beneficial but difficult tasks," continued Mustarde. "If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. We want to help make it easy and cost-effective so that everyone can do it -- they can have a Big Data strategy. Maybe they can implement this on their own, maybe they still need a little help or maybe they still need a lot of help -- but we believe our technology will facilitate everyone to aspire to a Big Data strategy that they would never have thought possible before they laid hands on ClusterGX™."

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/galactic-exchange-closes-seed-financing-round-its-unreasonably-simple-clusters-big-data-2153934.htm

Galactic Exchange Delivers ClusterGX Full-Service, for On-Premise Managed Big Data

MENLO PARK, CA -#Strata + #Hadoop World, London  #GalacticExchange, Inc. today announced the availability of its #Docker container powered clustering technology ( #ClusterGX ™) as an on-premise managed service solution (ClusterGX™ Full-Service) for customers deploying Hadoop/#Spark Big Data applications.

Unlike any other on-premise Big Data solution, ClusterGX™ uniquely operates using master nodes for Hadoop, Spark and Impala running inside a cloud service managed and maintained by Galactic Exchange. Businesses can now deploy ClusterGX™ on-premise without the complexity of allocating, configuring and maintaining separate dedicated hardware to support the critical master node functions.

Despite the success of cloud offerings such as AWS, Big Data managed services offered entirely in the cloud are not the preferred option for many organizations. Either because of legal restrictions, sheer volumes of data generated, security concerns or other reasons many businesses choose to keep their data on premise where the opportunity for a true managed service, until now, has essentially not been an option.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwgeeks/article/Galactic-Exchange-Delivers-ClusterGX-Full-Service-for-On-Premise-Managed-Big-Data-20160531

Newcomer Galactic Exchange can spin up a Hadoop cluster in five minutes

A new company with a cool name, #GalacticExchange, came out of stealth today with a great idea. It claims it can spin up a #Hadoop cluster for you in five minutes, ready to go. That’s no small feat if it works as advertised and greatly simplifies what has traditionally been a process wrought with complexity.

The new product called #ClusterGX is being released in Beta this week at Strata+HadoopWorld in San Jose. It still requires that you bring your own data and application to run on top of the cluster.

As though the prospect of almost instant Hadoop clusters weren’t enough to make a big data geek smile from ear to ear, it gets better. That’s because the tool is actually open source and it’s free to use. That’s right, it doesn’t cost anything. The company is paying for the required cloud infrastructure  for now, which is a brave prospect because Hadoop does involve big data by its nature — and big data means lots and lots of data.

Galactic Exchange is not completely altruistic though. It does actually intend to make money at some point when it releases an enterprise version of the product complete with better security, support and all the kinds of features businesses tend to pay for if they like your product.

The product is actually geared toward small to medium businesses, the ones that can’t afford to hire dedicated teams to spin up and manage Hadoop clusters, company CEO Rob Mustarde explained to me.

How simple is it? It’s as easy as installing a smartphone app according to Mustarde. What’s more, you can install it as you like on Windows, Linux or OSX (or even bare metal — a fancy word for a dedicated cloud server).

Over the long term, the company plans to expand beyond Hadoop and Spark, which is really only a part of what they hope to do moving forward. “Our long term plan is to allow all of your applications and compute and virtualized storage to work together in hyper-converged environment,” Mustarde said.

For now, launching with an open source product seems like a smart approach, and Nik Rouda an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group has the data to back up that notion. “In our research, more than 90% of those responsible for big data strategies said they valued their vendors’ active participation in open source, and 24% said they wanted a purely open source distribution for Hadoop environments.”

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/newcomer-galactic-exchange-can-spin-up-a-hadoop-cluster-in-five-minutes/