You may recall a creatively titled company that goes by the name of Hortonworks. Made up of ex-Yahoo employees, the technology firm is famous for its Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) that is used in deployments of Big Data.
Even if you don’t, prepare to hear a lot from these guys.
The company has just announced the availability of a beta version of HDP for Windows Server — and it is available for download from the Hortonworks website. General availability of HDP for Windows Server is set for the second quarter of 2013.
HDP started as a project inside Yahoo back in 2005, and once complete the Internet giant turned it over to Apache Group as a fully open source project.
It did not take long for it to be adopted by giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter, and now the technology is targeting businesses that want to run analytics on a vast amount of data in parallel.
Up until now the technology was only available for Linux, but now the Windows Server market can run and utilize the Big Data platform.
Linux, impressive as it is, only makes up 21 percent of the market — Windows Server on the other hand accounts for 51 percent of the user base, according to IDC, so this expansion makes logical sense.
And more importantly, HDP for Windows Server is 100% open source. It has come together as a result of collaboration efforts between Microsoft and Hortonworks spanning 18 months.
Even better, according to Dave McJannet, the vice president of marketing at Hortonworks, all of Microsoft’s work to improve HDP has been contributed back to the open source community.
