MapR Enahnces Open Distribution for Hadoop

Expands use cases, eases integration, and accelerates development.

Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor's statements.

MapR Technologies, the provider of an Apache Hadoop distribution, today announced a range of initiatives that extends MapR’s openness for Hadoop. The announcement follows MapR’s inclusion in the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) as a solution provider member of the Data Services Workgroup to define enterprise requirements to address interoperability, security and manageability of Big Data frameworks.

Also announced today was the release of a fully compliant ODBC 3.52 driver as part of the MapR Distribution. This allows users to leverage hundreds of commercial and open source SQL-based tools, such as query builders and BI applications including Excel, Tableau, MicroStrategy, and a variety of 100 percent open source SQL tools, such as Kaimon.

An important dimension for any Big Data framework is the degree of openness with respect to data access. The standard Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) access announced today allows SQL-based applications to run SQL queries (via Hive) and provides open database access through a standard API. This joins the standard file access support provided by MapR’s support for the complete NFS protocol allowing any file-based application to read/write data directly from/to a MapR cluster.

“Unlike other Hadoop distributions, there is no need to deploy agents or specialized connectors to get data into and out of a Hadoop cluster,” said Tomer Shiran, director of product management at MapR Technologies. “MapR opens up Hadoop by allowing users to leverage a broad array of standard commands, tools and applications.”

MapR also announced today full support for Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), enabling MapR to authenticate users with common authentication back-ends, including Active Directory, LDAP, NIS, Kerberos, and a variety of third-party services. These capabilities augment MapR’s REST APIs, which enable functions and features of the MapR Control System to be easily integrated into third-party system management tools and dashboards. MapR also includes integration components for Nagios and Ganglia to ease integration.

Finally, MapR announced the immediate availability of source code for components of the MapR distribution. MapR includes a broad set of open source components as part of its distribution, including Cascading, Flume, HBase, Hive, Pig, Mahout, Oozie, Sqoop, Whirr, and ZooKeeper. All of the source code, patches, and updates are available for these modules and users have the ability to make changes and enhancements while still enjoying the reliability, availability and performance of the underlying MapR storage and compute framework.

More information is available at www.mapr.com.

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