Hitachi Vantara Adds Spark and Kafka Integration to Pentaho 8

Source: Pentaho, Twitter

Hitachi Vantara announced yesterday the release of Pentaho 8.0. The data integration and analytics platform gains support for Spark and Kafka for improvement on stream processing. Security feature add-ons are prominent in this new release, with the addition of Knox Gateway support. It also provides the ability for users to match compute resources with business demands in real-time. The announcement was made at the company’s annual user conference, PentahoWorld 2017.

Pentaho was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) in 2015. Post-merger, Pentaho had been offered as a standalone software platform until recently when Hitachi combined the Pentaho, HDS and Hitachi Insight Groups into a new unit called Hitachi Vantara. Future releases of the Pentaho platform will be released under Hitachi Vantara branding.

Version 8 enables users to bring up additional nodes and spread simultaneous workloads across all available computation resources to match capacity and demand. This provides flexibility between on-prem and cloud environments. Adaptive execution ensures that users can match workloads to appropriate processing engines without having to rewrite data integration logic. The feature is extended in this release, making it easier to set up, use, and secure.

Reading and writing Avro and Parquet with Spark is possible now, too, using the Pentaho visual editor. Version 8 includes granular filters for preparing data, improving repository usability, and easier application auditing. In a brief press statement, the company’s chief product officer Donna Prlich concluded: “Pentaho 8.0 provides enterprise scale and faster processing in anticipation of future data challenges to better support Hitachi’s customers on their digital journeys.”

The update will be generally available in November.