Big Data leader Cloudera Inc. is hoping to take the sting out of running Hadoop with the latest release of its flagship Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 platform. The new release includes a limited beta of a new tool that helps customers better understand which workloads are most suited to run on Hadoop.

The newly integrated Cloudera Navigator Optimizer is built on the same technology that powers Big Data Integration Service (BDIS), a product from Xplain.io Inc., which Cloudera acquired in February.

Hadoop is a complicated beast at the best of times, and lack of visibility into Big Data workloads only amplifies those problems. As a result, customers often find themselves running into the same obstacles over and over again, such as breakdowns in extract/transfer/load (ETL) pipelines, long wait times for reports, increasing system pressure from ad hoc queries and unnecessary query complexity.

Charles Zedlewski, vice president of products at Cloudera, said one of the main causes of this pain is that data workloads are too often inefficiently allocated, resulting in expensive delays, errors and unnecessary complexity. However, many of these problems can be circumvented by giving customers better visibility into their workloads, Zedlewski said.

The beta release of Cloudera Navigator Optimizer provides visibility into workloads to “help customers understand the ones that are the best suited for deployment on Hadoop,” Zedlewski explained.

This kind of increased visibility is critical for customers, Zedlewski argued, because it allows them to address inefficiencies and run the right workloads in the right systems.

That’s where Cloudera’s new Navigator Optimizer comes in. It eases the pain for customers by analyzing existing workloads and allowing them to see which are the most critical, where data is being accessed, and how it’s being used. Navigator Optimizer uses this information to create a “full optimization strategy” that helps customers get the best out of their Hadoop deployments.

“One of the most common questions is, ‘how can Hadoop complement and optimize data warehouse environments?’ as shown in ESG research,” said Nik Rouda, senior analyst at ESG Research. “Cloudera Navigator Optimizer, built on the innovations of Xplain.io, looks incredibly useful in answering this question. It will help identify the best candidates for workloads that could be shifted to Hadoop, as well as any inefficiencies or redundancies in queries.”

Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 also comes with new capabilities including the ability to perform analytics on complex data structures. This is powered by support for nested data types such as JSON on Impala, helping organizations to further their data discovery and business intelligence. Meanwhile, Impala has also been enhanced with column-level security to deliver fine-grained access controls for all users.

Cloudera Enterprise 5.5 is available to download from this link, with detailed documentation on the release available here. Cloudera customers can request limited beta access to Cloudera Navigator Optimizer here.

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