RainStor 6 Adding Archive Application

RainStor, Inc., provider of enterprise data store for big data, announced the availability of an Archive Application for Hadoop 2.0 with  RainStor 6.

The new offering makes it easier to deploy an end-to-end solution on Hadoop for managing and analyzing high value, sensitive data. With RainStor’s Archive App, users conduct high performance queries against secure multi-structured data in an efficient way. An Archive is deployed when an organization has rapidly growing data that needs to be retained for ongoing business queries or when governance rules mandate that data be online and accessible for specific timeframes. Business users require analytic access to multiple years of history storing raw detailed data in order to derive business value and insights.

“Hadoop adoption is being driven by its low-cost to scale, and by the perceived value of the rapidly expanding ecosystem of capabilities to support business analytics,” said Mark Cusack, chief architect, RainStor. “RainStor has been delivering analytical archive solutions to the world’s largest enterprises for a decade, and with RainStor 6, you can now take advantage of those capabilities running on Hadoop 2.0. We believe RainStor goes a step further to securing Hadoop as a ‘first-class citizen’ in the enterprise.”

New Archive capabilities include:

• Analytics Performance Speed-up: Building on RainStor’s existing interactive SQL-on-Hadoop stack, the new archive application features XQuery for hierarchical data and documents, and extends analytics support to SQL 2003. Users benefit from a 10-100X-query boost using native SQL against a mix of structured, semi-structured data and documents in the same cluster. Performance improvements also apply to queries against Hive, Pig and MapReduce. An archive on Hadoop should achieve performance levels on par with the source environment, which is typically a datawarehouse.
• RainStor Application Management on Hadoop 2.0: RainStor is open, standards-based, and is suited to run on HDFS. Certified on Hortonworks 2.1 and Cloudera Enterprise 5, RainStor integrates with YARN to ensure co-operation in managing resources across a busy Hadoop cluster. RainStor integrates with Apache Ambari for cluster monitoring, and with Hue for managing archive workflows. RainStor also provides connectivity through HCatalog, the interface to relational data. These capabilities offer users increased flexibility in selecting the tools that fit their needs.
• Governance for Greater Control: With this new Archive app, you gain enterprise-grade control of the data in Hadoop, through life-cycle data management features for retention and expiry. With a rules-based workflow you specify a record or groups of records to keep or delete, as they are loaded. Adhering to data governance practices has become a critical requirement and now you have greater control with your data, which eliminates time-consuming manual intervention or lost data.

“We’ve been active Hadoop users for some time with over a petabyte in our cluster,” said Art Popp, principal architect, T-Mobile. “We have deployed RainStor on our cluster which not only gives us data encryption with negligible overhead but also the most efficient way to scale as we continue to grow,” added Popp. “We look forward to integrating the new release from RainStor as it delivers enhanced performance, tighter Hadoop integration and simplified data life-cycle management which are exactly what we need.”

The RainStor Archive App on Hadoop 2.0 is available beginning July 2014.