Cazena was founded in 2014 by senior executives that had previously led Netezza’s foray into the data warehousing arena, prior to its acquisition by IBM. It launched its eponymous Data Lake as a Service at the beginning of 2018.
The company is based outside Boston, Massachusetts and has raised significant sums in venture capital from a variety of well-known venture capitalists. Cloudera is also an investor as well as a partner. Other notable partners include AWS, Microsoft Azure, RStudio, StreamSets and DataRobot.
Company Info
Headquarters: 1601 Trapelo Road S-205, Waltham, MA 02451, USA
Although it can be deployed in other modes and for other purposes, Cazena is a single tenant massively parallel analytics platform primarily targeted at providing a data lake as a service. The company’s proposition is that on the one hand organisations need a data lake (or lakes) to enable digital transformation but that, on the other, these are difficult to implement and require DevOps capabilities that are in short supply. According to the Gartner Group approaching 85% of big data projects fail, while according to Cazena’s own figures, 70% of data lake projects never make it into production. Whether or not you believe these figures, there is no doubt that a DIY approach to data lakes is complex and time-consuming. It will typically take months (Cazena suggests six to nine months) to get your own data lake up and productive whereas Cazena offers a pilot project that will guarantee to be producing results for you within four weeks. That’s a significant saving in time and effort. You should also get significant ongoing savings from having a SaaS solution that does not require significant management or administration.
Customer Quotes
“Sentier Informatics marketing analytics applications are Powered by Cazena, so we can focus on delivering measurable outcomes to our clients – not being DevOps experts. With Cazena, we can deliver applications quickly with industry-leading cloud security and performance.” Sentier Informatics
“If we had to do this on our own, it would have taken at least six months. With guidance from BCS Technology and Cazena’s SaaS Data Lake with Cloudera on Microsoft Azure, we were up in a couple of weeks. We were able to get to work on the data, without having to worry about all the other requirements of managing the infrastructure ourselves.” Victoria University
Figure 1 - Cazena Data Lake as a Service Intelligent SaaS Orchestration
The architecture of Cazena is illustrated in Figure 1. Much of this diagram is self-explanatory. One point that may not be clear is that Cazena is a single-tenant solution. Another is that you can have multiple storage engines within the same implementation, so you are not limited to Cloudera but can also leverage, for example, Amazon S3 or Azure BLOB storage. Thirdly, it may not be clear what 24x7 SIEM means. This stands for security and information management and means that the software is continually logging authentication events (across both the cloud and software components), and that it has anomaly detection capabilities that will identify potential third-party or internal security attacks.
Cazena provides everything you need to make the implementation and ongoing running of your data lake as easy as possible. It provides everything: infrastructure, data platform, analytic engines, and DevOps, all in a single subscription. That said, Cazena does not add anything at the engine level. Thus, for example, if you want to run Internet of Things applications based on time-series data, then Cazena does not contribute any additional capability beyond what is offered by Cloudera. Thus you need to be happy that the engines supported by Cazena are sufficient for your needs.
Figure 2 - The Cazena AppCloud
The other major part of the Cazena is the AppCloud. This is illustrated in Figure 2. It allows you to deploy third-party machine learning, analytic and other tools within the same hosted cloud environment as Cazena itself. As can be seen, it also supports the deployment of “partner apps”. This represents a significant part of Cazena’s go-to-market strategy, whereby systems integrators and independent software vendors can build their own applications on top of an embedded Cazena instance to market to their clients. Thus channel partnerships are an important aspect of the company’s business.
Cazena is all about faster time to value and ongoing simplicity. While it provides facilities such as workload monitoring and management it does not intrinsically offer you anything that you could not get from Cloudera (or S3 or whatever) on its own but it does provide automation that you would otherwise need to develop, or acquire via professional services. Whereas rivals in this space might argue that their solution out-performs arbitrary competitors, this is not Cazena’s mission. Cazena is focused on making life easy for you, taking pain away and helping you sleep at night. It handles all your security, high availability, auto-scaling, disaster recovery, monitoring and so on for you, with a single SaaS console.
The Bottom Line
If you need a data lake – and who doesn’t – then you have four choices: build it and manage it yourself, pay someone else to build it and then either you or they run it, license an appliance-based solution that will be quick to get up and running but will leave you to manage it thereafter as well as leaving you with an on-premises solution you may not want, or adopt the sort of approach offered by Cazena. A SaaS-based approach will be much faster and easier and should result in a reduced total cost of ownership as well as improved time to value.
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