Hosted Hadoop Services Firm Expands in Denver With Fortrust

Bit Refinery, which hosts and manages Hadoop clusters and VMware private clouds for customers, has expanded in the Rocky Mountain region with Fortrust.

Apache Hadoop services are a growing market as the open source framework for storing a lot of data across clusters of commodity servers for parallel processing becomes more and more commonplace in the enterprise. Major Hadoop distribution providers, such as Hortonworks, MapR, and Cloudera, have built businesses by providing paid Hadoop services around free distributions of the framework.

Earlier this month, Hortonworks became the first among its peers to file for an initial public offering.

If demand for hosted Hadoop environments continues to grow, it will be a growing opportunity for data center providers like Fortrust, which signed Bit Refinery for a colocation cage in its Denver data center.

Bit Refinery uses a variety of colo providers to host its infrastructure in other markets: Telx in Silicon Valley, Atlanta, and New York, Telehouse in London, and Digital Fortress in Seattle, among others.

“Although Hadoop’s model is built around redundancy, hosting with a company located within a secure and reliable data center is a top priority,” Brandon Hieb, managing partner at Bit Refinery, said in a statement commenting on the Fortrust deal.

In addition to Denver, Fortrust offers data center services in Phoenix and New Jersey within IO.Anywhere modules by Phoenix-based IO.