On June 28 2022, IBM announced Cloud Pak for Data 4.5, with planned availability for June 29, 2022.
IBM Cloud Pak for Data 4.5 offers new functionality and features designed to help organizations connect with their data and drive intelligent business outcomes.
Some of the highlights of the 4.5 release are:
Backup/Restore
Disruption-free backups and disaster recovery (DR) – highly sought-after features for a Data and AI platform. Cloud Pak for Data 4.5 administrators are able to take frequent backups that are online and disruption-free. Given the mission-critical nature of the Cloud Pak for Data platform, this new capability, coupled with Spectrum Protect Plus for Active-Passive DR, can help significantly reduce Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) / Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for enterprise workloads and availability.
Security
Security is top of mind for organizations. This release introduces additional Identity Access Management (IAM) capabilities including:
- Separation of duties: New permissions for creating and managing projects and deployment spaces based on roles.
- The IAM Service enables Cloud Pak for Data to use multiple identity providers for authentication.
- Improved security in shared clusters: No need to grant cluster-wide authority to the Cloud Pak for Data operators and the IBM Cloud Pak foundational services operators.
- Attribute-based access control: Rules are evaluated based on user’s SCIM attributes to provide dynamic security posture.
Installation
As installation is a key part of the user experience the following enhancements are part of the 4.5 release:
- A one-hop upgrade that enables organizations to upgrade from 3.5 to 4.5 or 4.0 to 4.5. This removes the need to go from 3.X to 4.0 and then from 4.0 to 4.X.
- Streamlined installation and upgrade experience, reducing dozens of user commands into a single script. Not only does this reduce human error, but can help significantly reduce overall install and upgrade time.
- Support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 4.6, 4.8, and 4.10.
- Fewer custom security context constraints, enabling many services to use the default restricted security context constraint (SCC).
New and enhanced services
Many service-level enhancements were introduced into Cloud Pak for Data 4.5 across machine learning execution engines, decision optimization, analytics portfolio, hybrid data management, master data management, z Systems support, and open source components. Some of the innovations and improvements in data fabric, business analytics, and data management missions are listed below:
Data Fabric
With intelligent knowledge catalog capabilities, organizations can elevate their data into enterprise assets that are governed globally regardless of where the data is stored, processed, or used. Cloud Pak for Data 4.5 delivers new and enhanced data fabric capabilities across four entry points:
- Multicloud data integration
- Extensible framework of open APIs and SDKs
- Enhanced platform experience supports inter-enterprise data acquisition and sharing
- Support for modernization of existing DataStage workloads
- Governance and privacy
- Semantic search to find assets faster
- Improved trust in data products through data lineage features
- More granular protection of data with attribute-based access control
- Customer 360
- No-code custom and multiple algorithms support
- Automated privacy with ML-powered probabilistic matching
- Trustworthy AI
- AI factsheets
- New fairness and explainability algorithms
- MLOps collaboration
Business Analytics
Organizations rely on Business Analytics for deep insights into their data. Cloud Pak for Data 4.5 provides this enhanced support:
- IBM Cognos Analytics Cartridge introduces additional features, such as multiple instance deployment with a single control plane, security migration and authentication, and enhanced enterprise scalability.
- IBM Planning Analytics Cartridge fully containerizes its engine. This enables full deployment on Cloud Pak for Data, high availability and backup/restore, and improved data access.
Data Management
Data source services strive to extend the functionality of Cloud Pak for Data. Here are some of the enhancements in the 4.5 release:
- Db2 is aligned with the overall Cloud Pak for Data backup strategy.
- Choose to run Db2 warehouse on a single node for cost-efficiency or on multiple nodes for improved performance.
- Support for vault: organizations can store credentials and certificates either in Kubernetes secrets or in vault.
- Storage support for EKS/ROSA: Validated Block Storage(EBS) and File Storage(EFS) on AWS.
zSystems
IBM zSystems serve business critical transactional workloads to the majority of the world’s top 500 enterprises and hosts the some of the most relevant business data that are key to deriving actionable insight and digital transformation. IBM Cloud Pak for Data 4.5 integrates IBM zSystems data across the data fabric scenarios. It helps unlock access to some of an enterprise’s most valuable and sensitive data whilst retaining control and oversight over that asset, maintaining high levels of security and compliance and at the same time benefits from IBM zSystems qualities of service.
- Knowledge insight – Self-service through enriched discovery capability, catalog and semantic search through automatic Watson Knowledge Catalog updates.
- Unified governance – Common set of data governance, protection and security policies and rules with automatic enforcement on data sources within the enterprise.
- Intelligent integration – Large range of integration options across IBM zSystems and public cloud, including data virtualization, replication and in-situ access, thereby helping to enable choice – based on business imperatives, not technological constraints.
- Wide scope – Supports not only Db2 for z/OS, but other IBM zSystems data sources such as IMS and VSAM.
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