Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows Bridges Hadoop, Windows

The Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows — commonly known as HDP for Windows — was created by Hortonworks and Microsoft, bringing Apache Hadoop and Windows together for enterprise users.

The partnership is designed, notes Hortonworks, to “significantly expand the ecosystem for the next generation big data platform” by allowing users to deploy Hadoop via Windows Server. It also provides IT professionals with more choices as to how they deploy and navigate Hadoop.

“The beta version of HDP for Windows,” observed Microsoft’s TechNet blog, “was well received by industry press.”

Microsoft, in announcing the release, stated:

Plays Well With Others

The benefit of this software collaboration, as ZDNet notes, is that users can easily deploy Hadoop on Windows Server. HDP for Windows is interoperable across Linux, Windows Server, and Windows Azure. The product also integrates with other Microsoft services and products.

Having Hadoop available via Windows is a boon to developers, notes Hortonworks, particularly because users can easily work with existing tools for data analysis. This includes applications, for example, such as Microsoft Excel and Power View. Data analysts can be given SQL-like access to Hadoop as well. It also makes deployment easier, eliminating testing and fumbling about in an attempt to find the correct and optimal Hadoop products/distributions to implement.

Several New Features

The platform improvements are, however, lagging those of HDP, which is now on version 2.0. Although not yet available for Windows, an update of HDP for Windows will be released with several new features offered in the newest iteration of the platform. Justin Sears, Hortonworks’ Product Marketing manager, delineates some of the more important ones:

• Efficient new data processing workloads running side-by-side in Apache Hadoop YARN, the Hadoop operating system
• Interactive queries at petabyte scale, made possible by Apache Hive v0.12 and the Stinger Initiative
• Easier provisioning, monitoring and management of an HDP2 clusters with Apache Ambari v1.4.1
• Remarkable reductions in mean time to recovery (MTTR) with Apache HBase improvements in version 0.96

HDP for Windows is available for download from Hortonworks. If you have questions about how HDP can work for you, just ask us.

Image by Dave Fayram, under Creative Commons license.