BlueData Announces General Availability on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 12, 2018 — BlueData, provider of a leading container-based software platform for AI and Big Data workloads, today announced the general availability (GA) of its BlueData EPIC software on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. This makes BlueData the only unified solution for Big-Data-as-a-Service and AI-as-a-Service with the flexibility to support all three major public cloud services as well as on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments.

Public cloud services continue to be an increasingly popular option for many workloads in the enterprise – including applications for distributed analytics, data science, machine learning, and deep learning. But most enterprises today want the ability to deploy these applications quickly and easily regardless of the infrastructure, either on- or off-premises. They want self-service, elastic, automated, and secure environments for machine learning and analytics – whether the underlying compute and data storage is hosted in one public cloud or another, in their own data centers, or in a hybrid architecture.

Leveraging the inherent infrastructure portability of Docker containers, BlueData is committed to supporting these multi-cloud and hybrid cloud options for Big Data and AI deployments. Last fall, BlueData introduced the initial directed availability of BlueData EPIC on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure – adding to its existing GA support for Amazon Web Services (AWS). And over this past year, BlueData has introduced additional new capabilities for AI, machine learning, and deep learning applications in multi-cloud and hybrid models.

Now BlueData offers the same GA functionality for all three major public providers including AWS, Azure, and GCP. Customers can deploy BlueData EPIC standalone on any of these public cloud providers. Or they can use BlueData EPIC to provide a unified solution across multiple cloud providers (i.e. in support of a multi-cloud strategy) as well as on-premises infrastructure (i.e. for a hybrid cloud strategy).

Some of the key benefits include to this approach include:

• Common self-service user interface: Data science teams can have the same user experience to spin up on-demand environments for AI and Big Data workloads, regardless of the infrastructure.
• Common governance, security, and control: Administrators and IT teams can ensure consistent authentication, access, and enterprise-grade security in a hybrid or multi-cloud deployment.
• In-place analytics with compute / storage separation:  Customers can tap into data wherever it’s stored (on-premises or cloud), resulting in less data duplication and reduced data transfer costs.
• Flexibliity and infrastructure portability: The same Docker application images can be used with any public cloud or on-premises, avoiding cloud lock-in and future-proofing the deployment.

“Many of our customers have embarked on a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy for their AI, ML, and analytics initiatives,” said Kumar Sreekanti, co-founder and CEO of BlueData. “Our mission is to help these enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journeys, while making the underlying infrastructure invisible with containerization and automation. Our initial customer deployments were on-premises, then we added AWS and hybrid capabilities – and now we’re excited to extend our multi-cloud support with general availability for Azure and GCP.”

The BlueData EPIC platform provides extensive functionality for multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, including:

• Pre-built automation templates: A new automation toolkit can be used for both on-premises and cloud deployments. BlueData EPIC also supports the native AWS, Azure, and GCP deployment tools.
• Higher utilization of cloud instances: BlueData EPIC allows for denser packing of containers in each cloud instance, thereby increasing utilization and reducing costs for public cloud deployments.
• Multi-tenancy and isolation: BlueData provides secure multi-tenancy and strict network isolation between tenants, without interferring with any cloud-specific networking constructs.
• Flexible cloud storage access: With BlueData, containerized clusters can run jobs against cloud storage (e.g. Amazon S3, Azure Blog Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, Google Cloud Storage).
• Hybrid data access: BlueData provides the unique and differentiated ability to tap into on-premises storage (e.g. a Hadoop data lake) from compute clusters running in AWS, Azure, or GCP.

You can see a demo in BlueData’s booth (# 1034) at the Strata Data Conference in New York City this week.  You can learn more about running stateful Big Data and AI applications on containers by joining the session “What’s the Hadoop-la about Kubernetes?” with BlueData’s vice president of products, Anant Chintamaneni, and director of solutions management, Nanda Vijaydev, at 2:05pm today Wednesday, September 12.

Also at the Strata event in New York today, Cloudera announced the winners of the annual Data Impact Awards – for organizations achieving innovative data-driven results with machine learning and analytics. Joint BlueData-Cloudera customer Barclays won the award in the category of Modern Data Warehousing [LINK]. Other BlueData-Cloudera customers wererecently named award finalists: GM Financial (in the Enterprise Machine Learning category) and Seattle Children’s Hospital (in the Societal Impact category). All three customers were nominated by BlueData.

About BlueData Software, Inc.

BlueData is transforming how enterprises deploy Big Data analytics and machine learning. The BlueData EPIC software platform uses Docker container technology to make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective for enterprises to innovate with Big Data and AI technologies – enabling Big-Data-as-a-Service either on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid architecture. With BlueData, they can spin up containerized environments within minutes, providing data scientists with on-demand access to the applications, data, and infrastructure they need. Based in Santa Clara, California, BlueData was founded by VMware veterans and its investors including Amplify Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Dell Technologies Capital, Ignition Partners, and Intel Capital.

Source: BlueData Software, Inc.