Microsoft supports Hadoop

Microsoft has decided to support users who want to make Hadoop clusters on Windows Server and Windows Azure. As part of a strategic collaboration with Hortonworks , a stack for Hadoop will be developed . Microsoft promises to publish code under an open license, making commits to the Apache project at the end of development.

In addition , Microsoft will create “simple versions that can be downloaded, installed, and configured” for various Hadoop-related technologies, including HDFS, Hive, and Pig. This should encourage the use of Hadoop by corporate customers.

Hortonworks brings together developers who worked on Hadoop at Yahoo. As you know, Yahoo made a great contribution to the development of this open source project and in February 2008 raised the largest cluster on Hadoop from more than 10 thousand Linux-servers.

The test version of the Hadoop stack for Windows Azure will be released before the end of 2011, and for Windows Server - next year. The new stack will work with Microsoft business software, including Excel, PowerPivot, and PowerView.

This is not the first step from Microsoft to support Hadoop. Last week, the final versions of the Hadoop connectors for SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse were released.

At the same time, Microsoft continues to develop its own systems, which should become an alternative to Hadoop and MapReduce. True, work on projects codenamed Dryad (an analog of Hadoop) and Daytona (MapReduce) is still far from complete.

At the same time, Microsoft announced that the next version of SQL Server 2012 (Denali) will be released in the first half of 2012, now it is at the CTP 3 stage, then there will be RTM and the final release without preliminary public beta.

via All About Microsoft