Hortonworks and Red Hat deepen strategic alliance

Hortonworks and Red Hat, Inc. have expanded their relationship through the formation of a strategic alliance encompassing the integration of product lines, joint go-to-market initiatives and collaborative customer support. The companies also announced the availability of the beta program for the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) plug-in for Red Hat Storage.

Hadoop continues to gain traction in enterprise big data implementations. A recent IDC study commissioned by Red Hat, titled “Trends in Enterprise Hadoop Deployments” reports, “... 32% of respondents indicated that their firms have existing Hadoop deployments. An additional 31% indicated that they had plans to deploy it within 12 months. And finally 36% said that their Hadoop deployment schedule could go beyond 12 months.”

A comprehensive open source approach to the Hadoop platform can address the growing requirements of key enterprise stakeholders and their big data initiatives. 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 enterprise stakeholders to more quickly analyze big data to realize business insights and value.

Immediate initiatives that are included in the expanded Hortonworks and Red Hat strategic alliance include:
· Data architects will be able to combine data in a single, scalable open source repository. Available in beta software version, 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.
· 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 full range of deployment scenarios – from physical to virtual and cloud. HDP combined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenJDK provides faster development of enterprise-strength analytic applications. HDP combined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform gives elastic Hadoop services on a secure, private cloud infrastructure to lower costs and improve flexibility.
· Developers will be able to 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.