Hortonworks has announced that the Hortonworks Data Platform is now available for Windows in addition to Linux, enabling organizations to run Hadoop-based solutions natively on Windows. The beta release is available now for download from Hortonworks, and will be generally available in the second quarter of 2013.
“For the first time, we are making available the Hortonworks Data Platform, which is a 100% open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, available on Windows,” David McJannet, vice president of marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Hortonworks has also submitted two new incubation projects to the Apache Software Foundation and also announced the launch of the new "Stinger Initiative." These three projects seek to address key enterprise requirements regarding Hadoop application security and performance.
According to Hortonworks, by making the Hortonworks Data Platform available for Windows it is building on its long-term collaboration with Microsoft. It is also a necessary step in its strategy to broaden the reach of Apache Hadoop across the enterprise. This move comes in recognition of the fact that a sizeable portion of the data center runs on Windows servers, and that there is significant commercial interest in this capability, says McJannet. It is important, he says, because it will enable not just Microsoft customers, but also the Microsoft ecosystem of ISVs and others that work with Microsoft, to have the ability to build new applications using Hadoop that run on the operating system around which they have built their businesses.
Hortonworks’ work to enable Hadoop to run on Windows has been pushed back into the open source community so that other participants of the community can take it forward and collaborate as they can with any other feature that Hortonworks has added.
For more information is available from Hortonworks about the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows.