Datameer Offers Newly Cloud-Architected Big Data Platform Through AWS

Datameer has debuted a new edition of the company's data preparation and exploration software that's architected for the cloud and delivered through Amazon Web Services.

The new offering comes in response to demands from businesses that are moving to a hybrid cloud-computing model and seeking data preparation tools that are more agile and scalable.

While Datameer's software has been available as a hosted service on cloud platforms, the new release is specifically configured for the cloud. The main difference is that the new software's compute and storage functionality is separated, making the software more flexible by better utilizing compute and storage resources as needed.

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"That gives us the needed elasticity, which is a big difference between what we had before and what we can do today," said John Morrell, Datameer's senior director of product marketing, in an interview.

Morrell said the new AWS-based offering helps businesses resolve the dilemma of working with "shadow data lakes" – massive stores of data in cloud systems such as AWS' S3 (Simple Storage Service) that are difficult to process and analyze.

The new Datameer platform can be rapidly deployed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, uses persistent storage on AWS S3, and harnesses the compute power of AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) Hadoop. The software also provides a connector for data import/export to Amazon Redshift and is integrated with Amazon Authentication and Access Control, and with the AWS Management Console.

The new cloud architecture provides Datameer's channel partners with a more flexible delivery model for the company's product, Morrell said.

Datameer, meanwhile, remains on track for making its new Visual Explorer software, which the company announced in late September, generally available in December, Morrell said.

Visual Explorer leverages dynamic indexing technology to bring advanced data visualization capabilities to the Datameer big data platform. The software makes possible interactive visual exploration of extremely large datasets such as those found in today's data lakes.

While the Datameer platform is primarily used by data engineers for data integration and other tasks, the Visual Explorer tool is targeted toward business analysts for data exploration and discovery – helping them gain an understanding of the data before using business intelligence tools like Tableau or Qlik to analyze it.