Zettaset has announced SHadoop, a new security initiative designed to improve security for Hadoop.
According to the company, with its Hadoop Orchestrator, it offers a self-healing data management environment within Hadoop that identifies potential system failures and corrects them automatically. The solution also features enterprise Hadoop components, which the vendor says are not found in free open source versions of Hadoop. These components automatically maintain the health and welfare of the user's cluster, making administration of a Hadoop cluster more simple. The new SHadoop initiative will be incorporated as a security layer into Zettaset's Hadoop Orchestrator data management platform.
"Hadoop is a very young project and it suffers from a lot of the same maladies that a lot of really good technologies suffer from," Brian Christian, Zettaset founder and CTO, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "It solved a specific problem first and foremost, and then when it started to catch on and get more of a mainstream focus, people realized that they had forgotten to build security into it."
Zettaset's SHadoop layer is intended to mitigate architectural and input validation issues that exist within the core Hadoop code, and improve upon user role audit tracking and user level security. The SHadoop initiative alleviates security issues across a Hadoop implementation through the following features:
- Kerberos authentication, now available on the platform, provides initial user authentication using the Zettaset UI;
- Role-based security for the UI and API, including the ability to restrict execution of jobs, import/export capabilities and administration capabilities within the platform;
- Extensive audit log capabilities, including the ability to track all user or group activity within the platform through the UI, Zettaset command line or Zettaset API.
Christian says Zettaset is taking a three-phased approach with rolling out SHadoop. The first approach is to provide user access control "because until you do that there is no point in talking about anything else." The company will make more security features available later this month or next, and future versions of SHadoop later this year will enhance security through encryption on the Hadoop cluster (from a file system perspective) and encrypted communication between nodes.
According to the company, SHadoop will also give administrators the ability to establish and store a baseline security policy for all the users that can be compared against the current security policy. In addition, users will be able to synchronize user/group permissions with the Unix Operating System, Active Directory, the Zettaset platform and Kerberos.
For more information, visit www.zettaset.com.