sqrrl Making NSA's Big Data Analytics More Accessible

Cambridge-based sqrll is a big data company that makes an enterprise grade edition of the Apache Accumulo software. Accumulo is a massively scalable, secure data store with real-time analytical capabilities. It handles large amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data and can be integrated with any Hadoop deployment. sqrrl announced that its software product, sqrrl enterprise, has been added to NASA’s Scientific Engineering Workstation Procurement IV (SEWP IV) Government-wide Acquisition Contract through a reseller agreement with Technica Corporation.

Scalable, secure big data with real-time analysis

Apache Accumulo is a NoSQL database originally developed by the National Security Agency and now available to others as an open source software project via the Apache Foundation. sqrrl’s distribution of the software features additional data ingest, data management, data security, and analytic features not available in the open source version. Last month sqqrl also added its big data analytics solutions to Triad's GSA schedule, GS-35F-0298W.

"For government customers trying to figure out Big Data, sqrrl can provide a unique solution," said Ely Kahn, Vice President of Business Development at sqrrl. "We are the only real-time data store that combines fine-grained security controls, scalability to the 10s of petabytes, flexible schemas for unstructured and semi-structured information, and diverse analytical capabilities. Our team has worked with some of the world’s largest, most complex, and most sensitive data sets, and now we are ready to bring those capabilities and lessons learned to customers throughout the government."

A key advantage of sqrrl is that its solutions enable users to move beyond Hadoop batch processing and conduct a wide variety of real-time analyses, including information retrieval, statistical, graph, and visualizations across diverse data environments. It can scale to tens of petabytes with low administration overhead and has fine-grained security controls.

Privately held sqrrl was found in June 2012 by the creators of Apache Accumulo. sqrrl CTO and co-founder Adam Fuchs was previously at the National Security Agency, and Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Ely Kahn was previously Director of Cybersecurity Strategy at the National Security Staff in the White House.

The momentum behind Accumulo increased last week when Amazon Web Services announced that users could spin up Accumulo clusters utilizing Amaon's Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Framework.  sqrrl's enterprise product runs on top of Apache Accumulo and Hadoop, so the Amazon ERM instance will provide customers with another use pattern for sqrrl.