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Hortonworks and Red Hat announced an expansion of their existing relationship to form a strategic alliance that will include the new Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) plug-in for Red Hat Storage.
The enhanced alliance between open-source leaders in the Hadoop and Linux worlds encompasses the integration of product lines, joint go-to-market initiatives and collaborative customer support, as well as the availability of the beta program for the HDP plug-in for Red Hat Storage. Red Hat and Hortonworks presented a Webcast Feb. 10 to provide detail on their expanded alliance.
Hadoop continues to gain traction in enterprise big data implementations. According to a recent IDC study commissioned by Red Hat, “… 32 percent of respondents indicated that their firms have existing Hadoop deployments. An additional 31 percent indicated that they had plans to deploy it within 12 months. And finally 36 percent said that their Hadoop deployment schedule could go beyond 12 months.”
“At the rapid rate that enterprises expand their Hadoop requirements—due to the business consistently identifying new use cases and more internal stakeholders—the Red Hat and Hortonworks strategic alliance provides a seamless approach to enabling the next generation of data-driven applications,” Shaun Connolly, vice president of corporate strategy at Hortonworks, said in a statement. “Our mutual customers complement both their Hadoop strategy and commitment to community-driven open-source innovation.”
Red Hat said that, with an enterprise Apache Hadoop platform that is tightly integrated with open hybrid cloud technologies, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, OpenJDK, Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat Storage, the two companies plan to deliver infrastructure solutions that enable the next generation of data-driven applications. This will enable enterprises to more quickly analyze big data.
“Hortonworks and Red Hat are natural partners, given the strong commitment to open source on both sides,” Matthew Aslett, research director of data management and analytics at 451 Research, said in a statement. “The strategic alliance will benefit Hortonworks and Red Hat customers looking to develop and deploy Hadoop applications, as well as the wider Hadoop community as the results of joint-development work are contributed back into Apache Hadoop.”
Moreover, the expanded alliance will help developers quickly build new analytic applications to take advantage of new data types, and data analysts will have improved access to data through standard interfaces. HDP combined with Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization integrates Hadoop with existing information sources, including data warehouses, SQL and NoSQL databases, enterprise and cloud applications, and flat and XML files. The solution creates business-friendly, reusable and virtual data models with unified views by combining and transforming data from multiple sources including Hadoop. This creates integrated data available on-demand for external applications through standard SQL and Web services interfaces.
“Data—specifically data running processed with Hadoop—is the killer application for the open hybrid cloud. Enterprises are looking to IT solution providers to help with a dramatic reduction in time-to-results for their big data projects,” said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of storage and big data at Red Hat. “Red Hat’s strategic alliance with Hortonworks is focused on helping customers with efficiency and agility as they embark on big data projects.”
Red Hat, Hortonworks Enhance Relationship Over Hadoop
Meanwhile, enterprise operators and application developers will be able to elastically scale their Hadoop infrastructure to meet changing demand with an open and flexible platform that supports a range of deployment scenarios – from physical to virtual and cloud, Red Hat said. HDP combined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenJDK facilitates the development of analytic applications. HDP combined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform provides Hadoop services on a secure, private cloud infrastructure.
“Our strategic alliance with Red Hat is important for developers because the integration of the Hortonworks Data Platform with Red Hat JBoss Middleware and OpenJDK provides them with a new set of tools to build new analytic applications,” John Kreisa, vice president of strategic marketing at Hortonworks, in a statement. “Developers now have a tightly integrated, more comprehensive platform to create these applications on top of net new data types.”
In a blog post on the expanded alliance, Kreisa said the main goal of the Hortonworks/Red Hat alliance “is to help organizations adopt enterprise Apache Hadoop more quickly. This is a natural progression of our relationship with Red Hat because we are so closely aligned around a strategy of innovating in the open and applying enterprise rigor to open source software thereby de-risking it for the enterprise.”
In addition, data architects will be able to combine data in a single repository. The Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) combined with Red Hat Storage provides a secure and resilient general-purpose storage pool with multiple interfaces, including Hadoop, POSIX and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift). This can improve flexibility and speed the development and deployment of new and existing analytic workflows.
For a seamless experience, Hortonworks and Red Hat have been leveraging the Apache Ambari operational framework to add support for Red Hat Storage. Ambari supports pluggable Stacks and Services and Red Hat has leveraged this extensibility to add Red Hat Storage as an option when installing HDP via Ambari.
“We use Hadoop to capture and securely store an unprecedented amount of data, which has helped transform the way we do business,” said Mike Peterson, vice president of platforms and data architecture at Neustar, in a statement. “By taking another step to make Hadoop even more powerful, Hortonworks and Red Hat are helping enterprises like ours derive even more value from their big data strategy. Open source technologies from companies like Hortonworks and Red Hat continue to provide Neustar with the high levels of innovation required to meet the needs of our customers and grow our business.”
Meanwhile, Hortonworks competitor Cloudera addressed the new Hortonworks/Red Hat alliance. “Cloudera has the most extensive partner ecosystem of any big data vendor to ensure our customers can deploy an enterprise data hub with the flexibility that they require,” said Tim Stevens, vice president of Business and Corporate Development at Cloudera. “Cloudera primarily runs on Red Hat, and this announcement does not impact our relationship with them. Both Red Hat and Cloudera are committed to joint customer success.
“Cloudera is committed to providing developers with a familiar experience that makes it easier for them to use Hadoop as a ‘routine’ data source/target for enterprise data – examples being the contribution of the Kite SDK to the ecosystem, and certification of our software distribution for use with mainstream developer frameworks like Spring.”