Hey data heads! O'Reilly Strata Conference kicks off tomorrow at the Santa Clara Convention Center. If you plan to go you better have tickets because the event is sold out.

If you are attending the three days of sessions, keynotes, receptions and exhibits, please stop by the MapR booth for some face time with one of our big data partners and plan to attend their sponsored panel discussion which includes Cisco IT and other MapR customers facilitated by Mike Gualtieri from Forrester Research.

Best Practices for Hadoop In Production

"Mike Gualtieri, principal analyst at Forrester Research, Inc., will engage a panel of production Hadoop users -including Cisco IT, The Climate Corporation, The Rubicon Project, and Solutionary -to discuss the challenges and best practices for deploying Hadoop in production. Join us for an engaging conversation on tips and tricks in deploying Hadoop in production. 10:40am, Wednesday February 12 in Ballroom H" See more here.

Representing Cisco IT will be Distinguished Engineer, Piyush Bhargava. Piyush is Chief Architect for Data Architecture & Innovation and is responsible for finding new ways of harnessing value from data and for designing architectures to support data processing, analytics & data science needs.

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If you can't make it to Strata Conference or are double booked during this time slot you can get the goods on this topic from a number of other sources.

• First, check out the webinar Cisco and MapR produced with Mike that highlights the Cisco IT case study. Mike outlines the 7 Best Practices for Productionizing Hadoop, MapR follows with their best practices for data tables and Cisco IT covers their big data use case. If you want to skip to the Cisco IT use case, it starts at 34:00.

• Then, take a look at my blog post on the Cisco IT big data platform success story. Cisco IT has standardized on Cisco UCS servers and fabric interconnects for its big data infrastructure and uses MapR for data tables.

For operational workloads, Cisco IT has standardized company-wide on Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler with its unique set of adapters that include API integrations to MapR, Hive and Sqoop for big data workload processing.

• Next, spend some time reading the Unleashing IT Big Data Edition. This special edition of Unleashing IT is all about big data and highlights our joint Cisco/MapR customer Solutionary who incidentally, will join Cisco IT on the Strata Conference panel discussion on Wednesday. This e-zine is packed full of big data thought leadership; best practices for infrastructure and operations; customer success stories and include our partners Intel, MapR and others.

• Finally, peruse the Cisco big data website for all the latest on our solutions, partners, services and resources to help you make the best informed decision on moving your big data platform from development to production.

Big Data blogs I follow:
Raghunath Nambiar
Scott Ciccone