Intel Corporation today announced several updates to its datacenter software products that provide enhanced security and performance for big data management as well as a suite of tools that simplify deployment of machine learning algorithms and advanced analytics, including graph analysis. The announcements include the release of Intel® Graph Builder for Apache Hadoop* software v2.0, Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop software 3.0, Intel® Analytics Toolkit for Apache Hadoop software and the Intel® Expressway Tokenization Broker.

"Some of the leading data-driven companies have invested heavily to create and implement their own big data analytics solutions," said Boyd Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel's Datacenter Software Division. "Intel is bringing this capability to market by providing software that is more secure and easier to use so that companies of all sizes can more easily uncover actionable insight in their data."

Simplifying Analytics to Quickly Uncover Actionable Insight
Graphs analytics enables organizations to quickly find patterns in networks of linked information – known as graphs. Intel Graph Builder for Apache Hadoop software v2.0 is a set of pre-built libraries that enable high-performance, automated construction of rich graph representations that can model real-world problems and support a wide variety of third party graph databases, analytic engines and visualization tools.

For example, retailers can create a graph based on information from their sales history data and their social media data to better understand the relationship between brand sentiment and purchasing habits of their customers. The Intel Graph Builder for Apache Hadoop software package will be available for the Intel Distribution in January 2014.

With the Intel Analytics Toolkit for Apache Hadoop software, Intel is enabling more organizations to embrace machine learning techniques by reducing the costs and complexities associated with implementing predictive modeling tools. The toolkit provides foundation of common algorithms such as graphs and network-based clustering which IT teams can build on and customize with domain-specific code.

The easy-to-deploy algorithms are broad enough to be applied to multiple industries including financial services, healthcare and retail. For example, an e-commerce retailer that wants to create a personalization engine to predict the behavior of customers based on their history of clickstream data can use the Intel Analytics Toolkit for Apache Hadoop software as the foundational code, adding customized features on top to save time and money.

Enhancing Security for Data Protection
Building on the industry leading performance and encryption features in previous versions, the release of the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software 3.0 includes a number of security enhancements to the second generation of the Apache Hadoop architecture recently released by the open source community. The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software 3.0 includes support for Apache Hadoop 2.x and YARN* with major upgrades to MapReduce*, HDFS*, Hive*, HBase*, and related components.

The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software includes a number of unique security enhancements to Apache Hadoop 2.x, delivering up to 20 times faster encryption as well as decryption of data at rest, transparent encryption of data in process in HBase, MapReduce, Hive and Pig* applications as well as granular cell-level access control of data in HBase. The latest release also supports the open source implementation of the high availability feature in HDFS that removes the NameNode* as the single point of failure. The Intel® Manager for Apache Hadoop software, which simplifies deployment, configuration and monitoring of clusters, now supports YARN, Lustre* and GlusterFS* as Hadoop compatible file systems.

Improper management of data such as credit card account numbers and other personal identification information can violate compliance regulations and increase auditing costs. The new Intel® Expressway Tokenization Broker High Capacity Edition offers enterprises a simple drop-in gateway appliance that can support 1 billion tokens with high performance and cross-data center resiliency. The appliance reduces compliance risk by anonymizing and encrypting regulated data in-flight.

With its embedded high-capacity token vault, the Intel Expressway Tokenization Broker can scale with the size of big data workloads to remove data protection from compliance scope, dramatically reducing audit and compliance costs. This appliance is ideal for industries that run analytics on sensitive information and have compliance requirements such as retail for PCI-DSS, healthcare for HIPAA, financial for Sarbanes-Oxley and EU data privacy regulations.