Cloudera Adds Security, Disaster Recovery Tools To Enterprise Platform

Cloudera unveiled the tools, which will be available starting Tuesday, as add-ons to its broader Cloudera Enterprise platform, at the Strata big data event running this week in Santa Clara, Calif.

Charles Zedlewski, vice president of products at Cloudera, said the two tools -- Cloudera Navigator and Cloudera Enterprise BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) -- underscore the company's overall aim of transforming the open-source Apache Hadoop platform into an enterprise-ready big data offering.

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"We were founded nearly five years ago, entirely dedicated to the idea that Hadoop was going to become a pretty compelling technology, not just for the very small number of companies that were using it back then, but for a much broader enterprise audience," Zedlewski said.

But to make the open-source Hadoop enterprise-ready, Cloudera recognized it needed to arm its platform with certain solutions, such as those related to high availability and security, to fully meet the requirements of business users, Zedlewski continued.

"[Enterprise users] want to take advantage of all the innovation in this new kind of data management platform, and they want to take advantage of all the cost savings that it represents," he told CRN. "But at the same time, there are a lot of enterprise requirements that we needed to fulfill."

One of those requirements, particularly to meet the needs of industries such as government and finance, is data protection and compliance. Cloudera Navigator is meant to meet these requirements, offering capabilities for managing and analyzing sensitive data with Hadoop. Positioned as a complementary application to Cloudera's flagship data management tool Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Navigator includes a suite of auditing capabilities that allow administrators to index and store a full history of HDFS, the file system within Hadoop.

"It's an ability for companies that have policies associated with sensitive data to be able to audit, access histories of all the data, and be able to search and understand all the outstanding permissions [users] have," Zedlewski said.

Cloudera Enterprise BDR, meanwhile, is aimed at meeting enterprises' data backup and recovery requirements. The tool provides capabilities for configuring and managing disaster recovery policies for data stored in Hadoop through what Cloudera calls an "easy to navigate" graphical interface. Cloudera Enterprise BDR is meant to help companies meet service-level agreements and recovery time objectives through process automation, alerting and exception handling.

Cloudera, Palo Alto, Calif., also said it's rolling out an updated version of its Cloudera Manager data management application for Hadoop. The new version -- dubbed Cloudera Manager 4.5 -- permits rolling upgrades of the Cloudera Enterprise platform to minimize system downtime, along with ensuring tighter integration with existing enterprise IT management tools. It also delivers new interactive charts and dashboards for big data analysis.

Cloudera, one of a growing number of vendors tapping into the big data space, had raised $65 million in funding by the end of last year and has grown to about 320 employees since its inception about five years ago.

PUBLISHED FEB. 26, 2013