MapR Technologies, a provider of a data platform for AI and analytics, has announced a new product release and a free assessment service that provides a comprehensive understanding of a customer’s current data environment and the best practices to achieve a clear path to support AI, cloud, containers, and IoT deployments.
Additionally, the company has introduced its “Clarity Program” which it says addresses questions customers may have about data lakes, how to get to the cloud, support hybrid environments, leverage containers, and extend data processing at the edge, as well as their future roadmap in light of the Cloudera-Hortonworks merger.
The merger of Cloudera and Hortonworks “has put a spotlight on the fact that the shared underlying data platform is the same and there are 10 or more overlapping projects that need to be consolidated,” said Jack Norris, senior vice president, data and applications, MapR.
The Clarity Program consists of MapR Data Platform updates that allow MapR to support a diverse data management and logistics capabilities with standard interfaces to directly support tools such as TensorFlow, Caffe, and PyTorch.
MapR Clarity also includes the recently announced support for RAPIDS open-source software from NVIDIA and the ability to inject data flows directly into GPU-driven data science projects. New features for the MapR Data Science Refinery include support for the Helium repository browser and ability to share Zeppelin visualization packages across multiple containers. The Clarity Program provides these AI related capabilities today which clears up confusion caused by incomplete competing solutions.
MapR is also focusing on cross-cloud synchronization and data replication with new S3-compatible API support. Not only can on-premises file-based applications directly use object storage across clouds, MapR can coordinate data access and flows with existing Hadoop installations forestalling the need for wholesale replacement. Data synchronization across locations, whether on-premises, cloud or at the edge, remains a challenge for existing alternatives as well as merged solutions.
MapR includes support for frictionless data access for containerized stateful applications, direct data access with native Kubernetes volume drivers and the ability to use containers and Kubernetes directly with NVIDIA containers. Supporting stateful applications in containers remains a challenge for alternative solutions today.
MapR also extends to the edge with uniform management, security and data protection which includes integrated support for streams. There is no separate streaming cluster to manage or secure with MapR. New capabilities include support for Kafka KSQL that provides support for interactive and non-interactive SQL and allows launching stream applications with no need to write code in Java or Python.
Supporting data governance, the MapR Data Platform goes from on prem to cloud to edge with a common management, data security and data protection model.
The Clarity Program also includes a free StepUp assessment service to leverage MapR Professional Services’ expertise and offers a comprehensive program to understand the current customer’s data architecture, workflows, applications and uses cases. The Professional Services team will engage with customers to provide an architectural approach, performance planning and recommendations; feature mapping to address defined gaps and needs; and an implementation plan for on-premise, cloud, edge execution.
MapR Clarity Program is immediately available. Visit here for more information.