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BlueData, whose software enables enterprises to run Apache Hadoop and Spark deployments in virtualized environments on-premises, is branching out its capabilities.
With the launch of its newest EPIC platform version June 22, BlueData users now can run their computing in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance while keeping their data on-premises—a requirement for many regulated industries and for companies in the European Union.
As a result, Santa Clara, Calif.-based BlueData claims to be the first vendor to offer big data as a service (BDaaS) either on-premises or in the cloud.
It’s long been believed that compute and storage must be located together physically to provide optimal Hadoop performance. BlueData contends that this is no longer the case, and keeping storage on-premises while running compute in the cloud without any loss of performance is the product it offers.
EPIC features an app store and app workbench that allow “bring your own app” capabilities for big data. This is significant because most public cloud environments provide only one app toolkit with minimal configurability.
BlueData, however, supports a number of different toolkits, so an environment can be customized for Hadoop, while another environment may be more developer-centric—all on the same shared infrastructure.
The new summer release of BlueData’s EPIC software platform includes:
—One-click install for preconfigured Docker images: Several big data distributions and applications come preconfigured as Docker images in the BlueData EPIC App Store and can be installed via one-click deployment to accelerate time to business value with big data analytics. This new release provides reference images for recent versions of Hadoop distributions such as Cloudera’s CDH 5.5.1 and CDH 5.7, Hortonworks’ HDP 2.4 with Ambari 2.2 and MapR 5.1. Other updates to the App Store include Spark 1.6 standalone as well as recent releases for other common frameworks and applications such as Cassandra 2.1, Kafka 0.9 and Splunk Enterprise 6.3.
—Bring your own app: BlueData ensures compatibility with a broad ecosystem of big data frameworks and applications. However, most enterprises have specific and unique requirements to make big data environments comply with their internal standards. There are often different tools required for different user groups or different use cases, and these users often want the latest versions of their preferred tools. To meet these needs, BlueData has extended its App Workbench functionality to allow admins to easily modify and update the preconfigured Docker images in their App Store or create new images for other applications and tools.
—Unified user authentication and authorization: BlueData continues to invest in new functionality to ensure enterprise-grade security, governance and compliance for multitenant big data environments. New enhancements include broadening the scope of LDAP/AD integration for user-to-tenant mapping (e.g., to manage users as they join tenants, switch tenants or leave the organization) and adding access controls to virtual Docker nodes for Hadoop and Spark. These capabilities build upon several new security enhancements that were added in the spring release for BlueData EPIC.
BlueData customers can have their own App Store populated with Docker images for the latest versions of the big data applications and tools that their users want (e.g., Spark integrated with Jupyter or Zeppelin notebooks) to provide flexibility, choice and configurability. Once these images have been added to the App Store, data scientists and developers can instantly spin up ready-to-run clusters for these tools (with prebuilt security, SSH, networking and remote data access) using BlueData’s self-service interface.
A live demo of the new BlueData EPIC summer release and the App Workbench will be available at Booth 1505 at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, Calif., June 28-30.
You can learn about big data security considerations in a Hadoop Summit session titled “There Is a New Ranger in Town! End-to-End Security and Auditing in a Big-Data-as-a-Service Deployment,” on June 28 at 12:20 p.m. with BlueData’s director of solutions management, Nanda Vijaydev, and BlueData software engineer Abhiraj Butala.
In a separate announcement, BlueData also introduced support for Amazon Web Services and multicloud big data deployments for big data.