Cloudera has announced availability of Cloudera Enterprise 5.2. With Cloudera 5.2 the focus is on building products to deliver on the promise of the enterprise data hub that Cloudera introduced last year, said Clarke Patterson, senior director of product marketing at Cloudera.
In particular, new capabilities make the technology more accessible to users who are not data scientists and also increase the level of security, two hurdles which can stand in the way of Hadoop adoption.
“We have seen a huge uptick in terms of security at large. It stems from the fact that more organizations are looking to deploy Hadoop in production as it has become more mature,” said Clarke Patterson, senior director of product marketing at Cloudera.
In addition, Patterson noted, one of the benefits of Hadoop by itself and in combination with the existing infrastructure is being able to create a whole new class of data consumers. “As we all know there are people with different skill sets in any organization, but we want them to all be data-driven in some capacity. We are facilitating that through a lot of the enhancements with Impala, but with stream processing as well, capabilities for data science and search capabilities - so a technical person can interact with this architecture but then also a very non-technical person can interact with the architecture at the same time.”
Security Advancements
Cloudera Enterprise has achieved PCI security certification for sensitive data, and provides at rest and in motion protection of all data and metadata across the entire Hadoop cluster. This, combined with Cloudera and Intel’s involvement in Project Rhino, an open source effort to enhance security in Hadoop, including joint work on industry-standard Apache Sentry and HDFS encryption capabilities; the recent acquisition of Gazzang; and the launch of the Cloudera Center for Security Excellence make security and governance stronger for Hadoop.
With this latest release of Cloudera Enterprise, the company continues to improve and simplify security for Hadoop, ensuring a compliance-ready solution.
With Cloudera 5.2, the open source Hadoop UI, Hue, now supports Sentry policy management to visually create and edit roles and permissions for Impala, Hive, and Search; deployment and installation of Navigator Key Trustee Server is hardened; and there are improvements to the breadth and usability, including an updated auditing UI, enhanced component coverage, and auditing extensibility.
Impala 2.0 Unveiled
Impala enables high speed, interactive SQL analysis of Hadoop data at petabyte scale. Impala 2.0, the latest release of the open source analytical database for Hadoop, is included in the release of Cloudera Enterprise 5.2 and is an integrated part of Cloudera’s enterprise data hub. Impala 2.0 deliver high performance for both single- and multi-user concurrent workloads and enhanced compatibility with common SQL functionality.
Impala has been a significant addition to the Hadoop ecosystem and was the first product that really offered interactive SQL on Hadoop, observed Patterson. “Everything else was Hive based and didn’t have the performance characteristics that Impala delivered.”
Impala is gaining strong adoption in the ecosystem, and noted, Patterson, for all the customers that have purchased and deployed the Cloudera Data Hub, roughly 60% are using Impala in some capacity today. “It is a very big adoption pattern across our installed base which is fantastic and growing obviously.”
Cloudera Director: Hadoop for Cloud
With this release, said Patterson, the company is “putting the cloud a little bit more in Cloudera,” and “making it very easy to deploy our Hadoop distribution in the cloud.”
Cloudera Director has been introduced to provide a self-service experience for deploying and managing Cloudera’s Hadoop platform in the cloud for a variety of use cases. It provides a single administration interface for central IT to deliver agility and for end-users to self-service provision and elastically scale clusters, all while ensuring auditability. In its first release, Cloudera Director is fully supported on Amazon Web Services and lets customers take advantage of the elasticity and flexibility of the cloud without compromising on key enterprise requirements such as security, management, and governance.
Deeper Integrations for the Partner Ecosystem
Cloudera Enterprise 5.2 also features deeper integrations and strengthened relationships with many partners across its 1,200-member ecosystem to ensure a flexible experience for organizations integrating an enterprise data hub into their infrastructures; allowing them to leverage existing skill sets and investments; and also driving improvements across the Hadoop ecosystem as a whole.
Intel
The Cloudera 5.2 release marks the first major release where Intel and Cloudera have collaborated to contribute to CDH and represents a milestone in that the majority of functionality in Intel’s Distribution of Hadoop (IDH) has been incorporated into CDH. This enables Intel customers to migrate to Cloudera - gaining all the functionality and benefits of an enterprise data hub without losing anything from IDH.
Through joint engineering efforts in 5.2, MapReduce, the batch-processing engine, now leverages native tasks and is optimized for hardware making it both faster and more available. Additionally, these efforts have led to security advancements around HDFS encryption and Project Rhino.
EMC Isilon
Cloudera and EMC Isilon have also partnered to support a joint solution for seamless integration between the EMC Isilon Storage Solution and Cloudera Enterprise. By leveraging Cloudera Manager’s open APIs, Isilon is now available as an alternative storage backend for customers.
Cloudera Director: Hadoop for Cloud
Cloudera is unlocking the potential of Hadoop in the cloud with Cloudera Director, a reliable, self-service experience for deploying and managing Cloudera’s open, neutral Hadoop platform in the cloud for a variety of use cases. It provides a single administration interface for central IT to deliver agility and for end-users to self-service provision and elastically scale clusters, all while ensuring auditability. In its first release, Cloudera Director is fully supported on Amazon Web Services and lets customers take advantage of the elasticity and flexibility of the cloud without compromising on key enterprise requirements such as security, management, and governance.
Additional Features in 5.2
In addition to strengthened security and partner advancements, Cloudera 5.2 introduces enhancements to several key components, including Search, Spark, and HBase. For full details on what’s included with Cloudera 5.2, download the release notes.