Announcing Hortonworks Data Platform 2.1. on Red Hat Storage 3.0.2

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.1 on Red Hat Storage 3.0.2. This joint solution between Red Hat and Hortonworks allows you to bring the full analytical power of the Hadoop Ecosystem to the data within your Red Hat Storage cluster.

Red Hat Storage (RHS) is a great choice for a central storage repository. The fact that it is a software-defined, scale out architecture and runs on commodity hardware helps reduce your total cost of ownership, but it also simplifies managing storage capacity and allows you to grow your cluster at your own pace. For these reasons we think that eventually you'll end up with a significant amount of data within your RHS cluster and you'll likely want to begin analyzing it.

It is common for RHS users to start with Python and R analysis on your RHS data because they perform well and work intuitively with a distributed filesystem that is POSIX compliant and written in C. However, it is also common to want to explore using Hadoop because of the analytical power it brings with parallel processing, its ability to simplify ETL and the opportunity it offers to be used as a lower cost data warehouse. Rather than procuring new software and hardware infrastructure for an additional Hadoop cluster, one can actually use Hadoop directly on the data within the RHS cluster by installing the Hortonworks Hadoop Distribution directly on the RHS cluster. This solution configures RHS as the storage tier for Hadoop in lieu of HDFS. The solution works in a similar manner to how HDP would normally work with HDFS due to the fact that the HDP components are collocated on the same servers as the RHS components. This allows Hadoop to maintain data locality when scheduling analytical workloads.

Given that we initially shipped HDP 2.0.6 support with the GA release of RHS 3.0 in September, HDP 2.1 support marks the 2nd release of our joint solution with Hortonworks. In this release we've added support for Tez and HBase, we've augmented the security capabilities by validating the solution with RHEL Identity Management (LDAP and Kerberos integration) and we have also improved the user experience by simplifying the installation and configuration process.

If you're interested in trying this out, simply follow the instructions in Chapter 7 of the RHS Installation Guide.