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Expanding the Availability and Deployment of Hadoop Solutions on Microsoft Azure

Author: Shaun Connolly
VP Corporate Strategy – Hortonworks

Data growth threatens to overwhelm existing systems and bring those systems to their knees. That’s one of the big reasons we’ve been working with Microsoft to enable a Modern Data Architecture for Windows users and Microsoft customers.

A history of delivering Hadoop to Microsoft customers

Hortonworks and Microsoft have been partnering to deliver solutions for big data on Windows since 2011. Hortonworks is the company that Microsoft relies on for providing the industry’s first and only 100% native Windows distribution of Hadoop, as well as the core Hadoop platform for Microsoft Azure HDInsight and the Hadoop region of the Microsoft Analytics Platform System.

This week we made several announcements that further enable hybrid choice for Microsoft-focused enterprises interested in deploying Apache Hadoop on-premises and in the cloud.

New capabilities for Hadoop on Windows

Hortonworks has announced the newest version of the Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows  – the market’s only Windows native Apache Hadoop-based platform. This brings many new innovations for managing, processing and analyzing big data including:

  • Enterprise SQL at scale
  • New capabilities for data scientists
  • Internet of things with Apache Kafka
  • Management and monitoring improvements
  • Easier maintenance with rolling upgrades

Automated cloud backup for Microsoft Azure
Data architects require Hadoop to act like other systems in the data center, and business continuity through replication across on-premises and cloud-based storage targets is a critical requirement.  In HDP 2.2, we extended the capabilities of Apache Falcon to establish an automated policy for cloud backup to Microsoft Azure.  This is an important first step in a broader vision to enable seamlessly integrated hybrid deployment models for Hadoop.

Certified Hadoop on Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Increasingly the cloud is an important component for big data deployments. On Wednesday October 15 we announced that the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) is the first Hadoop platform to be Azure certified to run on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. This gives customers new deployment choices for small and large deployments in the cloud. With this new certification, Hortonworks and Microsoft make Apache Hadoop more widely available and easy to deploy for data processing and analytic workloads enabling the enterprise to expand their modern data architecture.

Maximizing Hadoop Deployment choice for Microsoft Customers

These latest efforts further expand the deployment options for Microsoft customers while providing them with complete interoperability between workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This means that applications built on-premises can be moved to the cloud seamlessly. Complete compatibility between these infrastructures gives customers the freedom to use the infrastructure that best meets their needs. You can backup data where the data resides (geographically) and provide the flexibility and opportunity for others to do Hadoop analytics in the cloud (globally).

We are excited to be the first Hadoop vendor to offer Hadoop on Azure Virtual Machines and we look forward to continuing our long history of working with Microsoft to engineer and offer solutions that meet the most flexible and easy to use deployment options for big data available, further increasing the power of the Modern Data Architecture. 

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