Microsoft is launching Hadoop for Windows Server and Azure at the O’Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World in New York today.
“Big data should provide answers for business, not complexity for IT,” said David Campbell, technical fellow at Microsoft. “Providing Hadoop compatibility on Windows Server and Azure dramatically lowers the barriers to setup and deployment and enables customers to pull insights from any data, any size, on-premises or in the cloud.”
For financial services users, this will mean they can pull data from a Hadoop cluster into Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot for Excel and Power View -- the tools of choice for the financial services industry.
The company also announced today an expanded partnership with Hortonworks, a commercial vendor of Hadoop, to give customers access to an enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop with the newly released solutions. All the code that Microsoft has developed for connecting Windows to Hadoop will be Open Source.
Hortonworks has been working with Microsoft on this connectivity for months. I first wrote about it in June.
Although I expected Microsoft to announce it at one of its technology conferences over the summer, development apparently took longer than expected with a lot of emphasis on quality control. Even now it isn’t clear what version of this software is available. Microsoft’s announcement said it is offering “new previews of Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows, the company’s Apache Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server.”
Some clients are already using it, the company added.
“Customers such as Progressive, Ascribe, CareGroup, and the University of Dundee are already using HDInsight to pull valuable insights from complex data sets in the cloud and on-premises. These new previews will be available tomorrow for download at Microsoft.com/BigData.” (Some of these links were be activated later on the announcement day, 24 October, so if they don’t work at first, try again.)
“Hortonworks is the only provider of Apache Hadoop that ensures a 100 percent open source platform,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks. “Our expanded partnership with Microsoft empowers customers to build and deploy on platforms that are fully compatible with Apache Hadoop.”
Microsoft will announce an expanded partnership with Hortonworks as part of its effort to provide customers with access to an enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop that is fully compatible with Windows Server and Windows Azure.
More information about Microsoft and Hadoop can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/bigdata.
