Cloudera unveils upgraded data lakehouse for enhanced AI capabilities

Cloudera, a hybrid data cloud solutions vendor, has unveiled the next phase of its open data lakehouse for private clouds, reinventing on-premises data processing for trusted analytics and AI capabilities on a large scale. It now stands as the sole provider offering an open data lakehouse with Apache Iceberg for private clouds, enabling customers to unsheathe the full enterprise AI potential of all their data.

AI models are best served by the quality of data they are supplied, pointed out Keir Garrett, Regional Vice President at Cloudera, Australia, and New Zealand. She explained, "As companies look to deploy more AI and machine learning (ML) technologies across the enterprise, there is an increasing demand for a trusted data platform that supports modern data architectures to help organisations access their data across all environments."

These advancements arrive at a time when AI technology is especially recognised for overcoming challenges in project management, particularly by Australian organisations, where almost two-thirds view it as a key solution. However, to successfully incorporate and extract business value from AI, enterprises face various challenges, such as managing distributed data infrastructures, governance risks or security apprehensions.

In overcoming these issues, Cloudera delivers Apache Iceberg to private clouds, thereby empowering organisations to rapidly scale their enterprise AI deployments, generating greater value. Apache Iceberg is an open-source, high-performance construction for immense data analytic tables. Its application to private clouds allows companies to harness AI for vast mission-critical data that exists both in the cloud and on-premises, opening up a range of new use-case possibilities.

As part of the upgrade, Cloudera is providing businesses with the ability to operate a completely air-gapped large language model (LLM) deployment — a premiere in the industry — thus increasing their security and data privacy while boosting performance and minimising operational costs.

Additional updates arriving with the new phase include Zero downtime upgrades (ZDU) and security enhancements like Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2, new Apache Ozone capabilities such as quotas, snapshots and disaster recovery enhancements for improved scalability and cost efficiency. Support for integrations such as Python 3.10, RHEL 9.1, RHEL 8.8 FIPS, SLES 15 SP4, Oracle 8.8, and JDK 17 have also been expanded for better compatibility and flexibility.

Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera, commented on the company's vision, stating, "Cloudera's mission is to empower customers to transform complex data anywhere into actionable insights faster and easier than ever before." Through a trusted data foundation for analytics and AI, the company aims to unlock endless possibilities for effectively utilising mission-critical data and building innovative AI applications.

Acknowledging the significant role of AI applications in maximising the business value of enterprise data, savvy data strategist Sanjeev Mohan commented, "For organizations to capitalize on this technological gold rush, data cannot be locked away in company data centers. Enterprises need a data management strategy that enables them to transform complex data anywhere into actionable insights through a comprehensive, open, and hybrid platform."