MapR whips out a pack of ACEs, eyes up containing Docker users

MapR has announced new security enhancements for its big data customers, as well as bringing in a services layer for enterprises tinkering with Docker.

Container technology, such as Docker, has been spoken of by plenty of developers of late, potentially needlessly.

MapR reckon there is a problem, in that standard Docker containers hold data volumes which are beholden to an individual server. If such a container were to be knackered, or moved from one server to another, then “the data volume is lost,” as put by Matt Aslett of 451 Research.

“As such, containers are not designed to be persistent – a key requirement for any data-intensive workload.”

Considering this, and wanting to get on the DevOps wagon, MapR is rolling out a POSIX Client, ostensibly to help customers throw their data-intensive applications onto Docker without worrying that anything critical might fail to persist in the face of application or server borkage.

Access Control Expressions (ACEs) were announced, and are intended to ease the management of data transfer between storage media, by granting permissions to users and groups across file an directories using Boolean expressions – something MapR reckons is scalable and manageable.

Whole volume ACEs will provide multi-tenancy controls to guarantee that data is only available to specific groups. This is especially useful in hosted customer-facing SaaS applications to absolutely ensure that no client can access another customer’s information.

A elective auditing would also provide flexibility to track only the required activities to audit and/or analyse, "giving flexibility in auditing while optimising system performance" according to the San Jose-based biz. ®