New Hortonworks Hadoop Release Offers Bulked-Up Security, Enhanced Data Governance Capabilities

Simplification is the focus of Hortonworks' new release of its Hadoop-based big data platform, both in terms of its ease-of-use improvements, and new configuration, governance and security administration capabilities that the company hopes will accelerate enterprise adoption.

Hortonworks expects to begin shipping the new release, Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.3, by the end of this month.

"The new capabilities in HDP 2.3 will empower more enterprises to leverage Open Enterprise Hadoop to drive transformational outcomes," said Tim Hall, Hortonworks product management vice president, in an interview.

[Related: 2015 Big Data: Infrastructure, Tools And Services]

Hortonworks is one of several vendors, along with Cloudera and MapR Technologies, that offer the open-source Hadoop platform bundled with additional software and services.

The new release includes extensive security and data-governance enhancements. For data protection, HDP 2.3 offers Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) transparent data encryption and an encryption key management store provided by the open-source Apache Ranger technology.

User authentication gets a boost through the addition of bi-directional SSL support with Apache Knox. And Apache Ranger now manages authorization and audit policies for Apache Kafka, Apache Solr and multitenant queues.

Teradata resells Hortonworks' software, building it into its Aster Big Analytics Appliance, and jointly going to market with the company. Chris Twogood, Teradata vice president of products and services, said in an interview with CRN that "security is obviously a very important component" of big data systems, and he praised Hortonworks for pushing security improvements in its software, especially the new encryption and authorization capabilities.

Teradata is currently working with the 2.3 release, but hasn't yet announced its plans for the software, Twogood said. But the company is supporting customers who have adopted the new release.

HDS 2.3 now includes Apache Atlas, a new Apache incubator project, which provides data-governance functionality, including a scalable metadata service and user interface for searching metadata and lineage.

The new Hortonworks SmartSense toolset provides proactive monitoring services for Hortonworks subscribers. SmartSense specifically monitors cluster utilization and system health, producing recommendations and analytics to prevent configuration problems. It also optimizes long-range cluster resource usage and capacity planning.

In April, Hortonworks struck a deal to acquire SequenceIQ, a developer of Hadoop rapid deployment tools, and Hall said the 2.3 release includes some of those acquired capabilities.

On the user experience side, HDP 2.3 offers a customizable operations dashboard with key performance indicators for system administrators, a Hive user view in the Ambari cluster monitoring and management application, and guided configurations for easier installation and configuration of HDFS, YARN, Hive and Hbase.

PUBLISHED JUNE 17, 2015