Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, April 18, 2024

Zaloni Announces Latest Release of Bedrock Data Lake Management Platform and Mica Self-Service Data Platform 

DURHAM, N.C., Feb. 8 -- With the latest release of its Bedrock Data Lake Management Platform and its Mica Self-service Data Platform, Zaloni continues to establish itself as a leader in the space by pushing the boundaries of what defines a “data lake,” expanding beyond Hadoop to encompass a more holistic, enterprise-wide approach. Zaloni’s vision is a “logical” data lake architecture versus a physical one, which gives companies transparency into all of their data regardless of its location, enables application of enterprise-wide governance capabilities, and allows for expanded, controlled access for self-serve business users across the organization.

“Organizations want to increase self-service capabilities without sacrificing the governance controls that are critical for IT and the overall business,” said Scott Gidley, Vice President of Product Management at Zaloni. “Bedrock and Mica enable a collaborative environment for both business and technical users – business analysts can quickly define and ingest data entities and create data quality rules, and more technical users can still fully transform and customize complex data as required.”

Addressing data lake visibility, governance and accessibility

Enterprises are still struggling to work with data at scale, hampered by a lack of integrated governance, lineage, security and reporting capabilities. Bedrock and Mica solve this challenge by addressing data visibility, reliability, security, privacy and accessibility. The key to the Bedrock platform is that it allows enterprises to easily design pipelines for complex data formats from ingestion to analytics, doing the heavy lifting when it comes to data manipulation so that businesses can spend more time finding insights. This new version of Bedrock provides more advanced and customizable dashboards, making it the command center for governing data within the data lake. The update to Zaloni’s Self-service Data Platform, Mica, provides a better, more intuitive user experience, enabling users to identify the data they want, faster.

“Zaloni’s latest update of Bedrock provides even more business value with comprehensive management and governance of the modern data lake,” said Nik Rouda, Senior Analyst, Big Data and Analytics, Enterprise Strategy Group. “By taking a more holistic approach to the data lake, Zaloni is positioning itself as a foundational platform that can operationalize any combination of data.”

Data lake expansion: No data left behind

The data lake is more than a Hadoop repository. To get maximum value from a data lake, it must be expanded beyond Hadoop to become a logical way to manage and leverage all the data in an organization, no matter where it resides. The Bedrock update supports this vision with more seamless and managed ingestion; metadata registration for complex data formats; inspection of data sources for metadata (introspection); increased flexibility for the type of data source and amount of data that can be synced with the Mica metadata catalog; extended support and an improved  file-driven user interface for working with natively ingested formats, including Avro, JSON and VSAM; and more support for relational database management system (RDBMS) connections, allowing engineers to easily sync thousands of tables at once while still providing fine-grained control and governance for processing change data, thresholds for parallelism, etc. “Our VSAM implementation has allowed customers to move from monthly reporting in their mainframe databases to daily reporting in the cluster,” said Gidley.

Enhanced governance: Metadata Exchange Framework

More control over data gives IT more confidence in making it more widely available. Another way this release of Bedrock has expanded the data lake is with its new Metadata Exchange Framework, which enables Bedrock to sync metadata with third-party metadata and governance tools. This new framework helps organizations ensure their data lake complies with corporate standards defined at the enterprise level, rather than duplicating this effort as the data lake usage expands. Additionally, Bedrock now integrates with third-party policy-based security frameworks to allow Bedrock to push down or pull data entitlements across the enterprise.

Improved access: Valuable insights, faster

To stay competitive and speed up time to insight, it’s critical for companies to democratize access to data for users across the organization. The Mica Self-service Data Platform does this better than ever with a more customizable UI, enabling more granular and flexible discovery, more accessible data lineage information, and a much more targeted display of data catalog results. Mica also allows users to add, prioritize and define/view custom metadata attributes in the data catalog to provide business-specific context to data, and integrates with data visualization tools so that now data scientists and business analysts can leverage Mica to more quickly find data they are interested in and then visualize it in the tool of their choice.

“We understand that siloed data systems, legacy databases and hybrid architectures are the reality for most companies,” said Gidley. “Zaloni’s approach to the 360-degree data lake takes this real-world data complexity into account to provide enterprises with a practical solution that works.”


Source: Zaloni

EnterpriseAI