BlueData Delivers Unparalleled Application Flexibility and Choice for Hadoop and Spark Implementations

SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwired – Jun 22, 2016) – BlueData, provider of the leading Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform, today announced the new summer release for the enterprise edition of its BlueData EPIC software. This new release offers comprehensive security controls along with enhancements that allow customers to take advantage of the latest innovations in the Big Data ecosystem and meet the unique application requirements for their organization’s data science use cases.

It has become increasingly difficult for enterprises to keep up with the pace of change in Big Data. It’s a rapidly evolving landscape for both data science and IT teams — with a steady stream of new products, new versions, and new options for frameworks like Hadoop and Spark. Data scientists and developers want flexibility and choice, with on-demand access to these new Big Data technologies. Big Data architects and IT managers are under pressure to support these new innovations and the ever-changing menagerie of tools, while also providing enterprise-grade IT security and control.

“Many enterprises are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation and constant evolution of Big Data products and services,” said Matt Aslett, research director for data platforms and analytics at 451 Research. “Thanks to its use of Docker containers, BlueData has a differentiated offering that should appeal to enterprises as they look to develop, test, and operationalize emerging technologies and get more efficient use out of their Big Data deployments.”

The new summer release of BlueData’s EPIC software platform addresses these challenges. Highlights of this new release include:

• One-click install for pre-configured Docker images: Several Big Data distributions and applications come pre-configured 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” for flexibility and choice: 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 administers to easily modify and update the pre-configured Docker images in their App Store — or create new images for other applications and tools.

BlueData customers can have their own unique 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) — providing the ultimate in flexibility, choice, and configurability. And 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 pre-built security, SSH, networking, and remote data access) using BlueData’s self-service interface.

• Unified user authentication and authorization: BlueData continues to invest in new functionality to ensure enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance for multi-tenant 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); adding access controls to virtual Docker nodes for Hadoop and Spark; and the ability to integrate pluggable authentication modules (PAM) for group or role-based Linux access privileges to Docker application images. These capabilities build upon several new security enhancements that were added in the spring release for BlueData EPIC.

“The rapid evolution of Big Data analytics and data science continues, from Hadoop to Spark and Kafka and more,” said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData. “Our Big-Data-as-a-Service platform brings the agility and flexibility of DevOps to Big Data — providing a secure multi-tenant production environment while enabling rapid iteration, prototyping, and experimentation with the latest tools that data scientists need.”

You can see a live demo of the new BlueData EPIC summer release and the App Workbench at Hadoop Summit in San Jose, June 28-30 at booth 1505. You can learn about Big Data security considerations in a Hadoop Summit session entitled “There is a New Ranger in Town! End-to-End Security and Auditing in a Big-Data-as-a-Service Deployment,” on Tuesday June 28 at 12:20pm with BlueData’s director of solutions management, Nanda Vijaydev, and BlueData software engineer, Abhiraj Butala.

In a separate announcement, BlueData also introduced its plans to support Amazon Web Services and multi-cloud Big Data deployments.

Supporting Resources:

Blog post: App Workbench — Managing the Menagerie of Big Data Apps

About BlueData Software, Inc.
BlueData is transforming how enterprises deploy their Big Data applications and infrastructure. The BlueData EPIC™ software platform uses container technology to make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective for enterprises of all sizes to leverage Big Data — enabling Big-Data-as-a-Service either on-premises or in the cloud. With BlueData, they can spin up virtual Hadoop or Spark clusters within minutes, providing data scientists with on-demand access to the applications, data and infrastructure they need. Based in Santa Clara, California, BlueData was founded by VMware veterans and its investors including Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Ignition Partners, and Intel Capital. To learn more about BlueData, visit www.bluedata.com or follow @bluedatainc.