Anybody who thinks Cloudera might be losing its edge should probably think again. While the upcoming Hortonworks Data Platform and Hadoop on Microsoft Windows has the industry buzzing, Cloudera today released the fourth version of its Apache Hadoop distribution and a significantly enhanced Cloudera Manager … and the results are impressive.

The Palo Alto-based vendor added high availability (HA) to its Apache Hadoop distribution, CDH4, in the form of a secondary namenode available for automatic, hot fail-over should the primary namenode in a cluster go down. This single point of failure has been one of Hadoop’s most glaring holes, preventing wider adoption in the enterprise to support mission critical applications and workloads. With SPOF issue potentially off the table, Hadoop – and not just CDH4, as Cloudera contributed HA back to the Apache project – could be poised to make its move on the enterprise.

Another sticking point with Hadoop has been security. Managing user access has been a tedious job, but CDH4 introduces table and column-level permission controls on HBase as well as a new scheduler feature to make it easier to control which groups can submit Map Reduce jobs. There are also new coprocessor capabilities that Cloudera says will enable Hadoop to better support real-time applications.

All of these new features and functions are open source and have been committed to the Apache Hadoop project.

But when it comes to helping customers deploy and administer Hadoop clusters, Cloudera keeps that IP to itself. Like CDH, Cloudera Manager, Cloudera’s proprietary software for managing and monitoring CHD4 (and earlier versions) deployments, also got a significant overhaul. Among the new capabilities are a simplified, three-step process for setting up HA, APIs to allow users to integrate CDH with outside data sources, APIs to allow administrators to surface Cloudera Manager alerts and monitoring in existing IT management tools, and heat maps for monitoring cluster health.

All of these upgrades and improvements to CDH and Cloudera Manager serve to illustrate Cloudera’s position as the most mature Hadoop distribution vendor on the market. The team in Palo Alto has been at it for over three years now and boasts a large and increasingly varied customer base. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its hands full with competitors MapR and Hortonworks. MapR has gained significant traction with its high-performance Hadoop distribution that swaps out HDFS for its proprietary (but API compatible – very important) storage services layer. Hortonworks, meanwhile, is expected to release version 1 of its core Hadoop platform, the Hortonworks Data Platform, at next week’s Hadoop Summit.

Speaking of Hadoop Summit, if you can’t make it to San Jose next week you can get full, live coverage at SiliconANGLE.tv. TheCUBE is covering the show all day both Wednesday, June 13 and Thursday, June 14. Guests include the aforementioned Clouder and Hortonworks, as well as DataStax, PayPal, Sears, Lucid Imagination, Syncsort and many, many more. Don’t miss it.