RainStor 5.5 has been certified to run on Cloudera Enterprise 5. RainStor and Cloudera have been collaborating since January 2012, when RainStor joined the Connect Partner Program offering a Big Data Archive solution for analytics against historical data to meet business and data governance requirements.
This new certification enables Cloudera customers to run RainStor natively on HDFS, while offering enterprise-grade security features.
Addressing Big Data Requirements
RainStor was designed and built for big data, and, with the ability to massively scale to petabytes, organizations naturally look to Hadoop as the file system or platform of choice, said Mark Cusack, chief architect, RainStor. “What RainStor brings to Hadoop is a host of enterprise-grade requirements when managing sensitive datasets. Lastly, the bottom line comes down to this – as your data volumes grow, you want to manage the cluster in the most efficient way and RainStor’s highly compressed data files enable you to do just that.”
Additionally, he added, RainStor enables ease-of-use and the low-touch maintenance that comes with that. And finally, as enterprises continue to push for innovation and the ability to do more with less, RainStor addresses the economic concerns that every CIO faces today.
“RainStor running on Cloudera Enterprise 5 is a significant step forward for customers taking a serious look at Hadoop. Cloudera has been leading the market and enabling key capabilities on Hadoop over the last few years. It has now reached a point where sectors such as banking, telco, insurance, pharma and healthcare now demand specific applications to run on HDFS. RainStor is focused on those exact industries that have big data and more importantly high value data,” said Cusack. “Cloudera customers can now take advantage of RainStor on Cloudera, a proven active archive solution. In fact, you can get up and running very quickly and teams don’t need any specialized skills as RainStor is designed to be easy to use, is open and standards based,” Cusack added.
Growing Data Stores and Growing Demand for Governance
Hadoop as a platform has made “great strides” within the enterprise, said Cusack, noting that according to Gartner, while only 8% of companies are now in production on Hadoop, 50% more have plans to go into production in the coming 2 years. “The rate of adoption has sped up and the range of use-cases has also increased. Data growth rates are not slowing down and business users continue to demand access to all the raw data in addition to multi-years of history.”
Additionally, said Cusack, external regulators demand access to transaction history and for specific timeframes, and RainStor addresses this precise problem. “Hadoop must now become a ‘first class citizen’ within the enterprise and therefore it must work with the same set of security frameworks as other RDBMSs and data management environments. RainStor believes that robust applications running on Hadoop will speed up adoption and that is good for the industry,” he said.
With RainStor’s Active Archive, end users now have a reliable and standardized way to store their most critical data assets. RainStor believes there should be no compromise for query performance when accessing data in the archive. You access the data using a wide variety of tools including interactive SQL, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and BI tools and in fact most queries speed up because of the RainStor compression and built-in filtering. One of the biggest challenges users face today is the learning curve on Hadoop and getting a cluster up and running quickly to add business value. With RainStor, you get a proven archive application that runs on Hadoop pretty much out of the box. This speeds up deployment, productivity and therefore faster time to business value. That’s something that end-users embrace so they can move on to the next high-priority Hadoop project.
RainStor was certified on a Kerberos-enabled cluster and was tested to ensure that RainStor’s compressed data files stored on HDFS remain fully accessible via a wide range of access tools including Hive, Pig, and MapReduce, as well as RainStor’s own MPP SQL query engine, all operating in a secure Hadoop environment. The compressed data does not require any re-inflation and, in fact, query response rates speed up, which improves overall productivity.
For more information, about RainStor, go to www.rainstor.com and for more about Cloudera, go to www.cloudera.com.