Rainstor announces enterprise security, search capabilities in new update

RainStor, whose advanced data compression technology offers significant storage footprint reduction with data stored in Apache Hadoop’s Distributed File System (HDFS), has introduced an update to its product, adding security and search capabilities.

RainStor has addressed security on a few levels. Authorization and authentication capabilities are provided via integration with Microsoft’s Active Directory, as well as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), Kerberos and PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). At the data level, RainStor has provided encryption, masking and SQL-based views. Audit capabilities and a record-level delete feature are part of the update as well.

RainStor is also adding search capabilities to this release. (This coincides nicely with Cloudera’s recently announced addition of Lucene-based search to its Hadoop distribution). RainStor claims search-based query introduces a 10x-100x speedup versus the SQL query interface that is also offered with the product. RainStor says that the overhead attributable to maintenance of search indexes is very low.

I learned about RainStor’s technology last Fall, when I spoke with members of the company’s team at the Strata + Hadoop World event in New York. I learned then that RainStor employs data compression that goes well beyond that provided by many column store database products. Combining this with enterprise security features and especially with free-text search creates an intriguing value proposition that enterprise customers may wish to evaluate carefully.