Hortonworks Makes Enterprise Hadoop Platform Cloud-Agnostic

Hortonworks has updated its enterprise Hadoop solution called Hortonworks Data Platform, saying it can now be automatically provisioned in any cloud environment. The company said it is now also easier for enterprises to adopt, simpler to administer, and more secure.

The open source platform provider relies on value-add around Apache Hadoop, focusing on making Hadoop easy to deploy securely across distributed clusters. One of the other big new features in release 2.3 is proactive cluster monitoring.

Hortonworks has also integrated several open source technologies other than Hadoop in the latest release around security and data governance.

Earlier this year, the company teamed with others to create a common enterprise Hadoop data governance framework. One of the fruits of that labor include Apache Atlas, a new open source project to build governance services that now ship with Hortonworks. Atlas features a scalable metadata service, integration with Hive metastore and SQL metrics, as well as a user interface for searching metadata and lineage.

Cloudbreak, the feature for automated provisioning of HDP clusters in any cloud environment, is a result of integration of technology gained through the company's recent acquisition of SequenceIQ. Hortonworks also recently became an official service on Google's cloud.

Hortonworks introduced SmartSense proactive monitoring service for subscription customers. It provides insights and recommendations about cluster utilization and health. SmartSense is used for better long-range cluster resource utilization and capacity planning, as well as quick and easy log-file capturing.

The release reportedly has better data protection with transparent data encryption along with an encryption key management store provided by Apache Ranger. Ranger manages authorization and audit policies, while Apache Knox takes care of authentication with bi-directional SSL support and LDAP data caching for improved performance.

"EMC and Hortonworks have a shared vision of a Business Data Lake which provides the ability to bring together data, analytics, and applications to deliver meaningful business outcomes for companies," Aidan O'Brien, senior director for Big Data solutions at Hortonworks partner EMC, said in a statement. "The new security and data governance capabilities and improved user interface in the latest release of the Hortonworks Data Platform [are] going to make it easier to achieve these outcomes in a more sustainable and secure way."

An example of user experience improvement in the latest release of the enterprise Hadoop platform is a set of guided configurations of HDFS, YARN, Hive, and HBase, making each easier and more predictable. Hortonworks has also focused on making it easier to optimize your setup. A customizable dashboard shows a cluster’s key performance indicators.