Zettaset,  a five year-old startup that develops software for managing Hadoop clusters, is extending its flagship Orchestrator product deeper into the technology ecosystem around the batch processing platform with a new feature called HBase Security. The upgrade marks a continuation of the company’s efforts to harden the core open source components of modern analytics infrastructure to the same level as commercial applications.

Apache HBase is a free  implementation of Google’s BigTable architecture that provides a scalable environment for storing massive amounts of unstructured information, particularly large database tables containing upwards of millions of columns.  The platform runs directly on top of the Hadoop Distributed File System, or HDFS, and provides a high degree of  read/write consistency that makes it well suited for many of the data-intensive enterprise use cases Zettaset is targeting with its offering.

The firm says that HBase Security packs a unified management console for installing, configuring and protecting large-scale deployments. On the latter front, it features a centralized  logging function meant to simplify compliance and role-based access control at the table, column and column family  levels. That’s not quite as granular as the cell-based security built into HBase contender Accumulo but still cuts it for large organizations that want to keep users  in one unit from viewing or making changes to information meant for employees of a different group.

“We take the user and group approach where you can have role-based access control and set policies, and that affords control who’s looking at what job and importing and exporting data – we have full logging and monitoring capabilities,” Zettaset president and CEO Jim Vogt told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview.  Beyond that, HBase Security ensures that data is unable to be read by any unauthorized party while not only in transit but at-rest as well.

“The second step is encryption, so we’ll be talking about encrypting data at rest, and also movement between the nodes,” Vogt added.

On top of everything else  the module enables automated failover for HBase and all other services managed by Orchestrator. Additionally, it enables both API and shell access and plugs into Ganglia, an open source tool for monitoring computer clusters. HBase Security  borrows most of its features with SHadoop, a fork that Zettaset introduced in early 2012 as part of an initiative to “mitigate the current security vulnerabilities” in the platform.

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