Announcing Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters on Red Hat OpenShift

Organizations globally are adopting OpenShift for various workloads including Big Data Analytics, AI/ML, Application runtimes, databases, developer tools, programming languages (Spring, Java, Python, etc.).

Data Analytics/AI/ML is a top emerging workload category on OpenShift, as mentioned in our recent press release. I am happy to share that Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters now supports Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (version 4.3 and higher), and Microsoft Azure Red Hat Openshift (a fully managed service of OpenShift on Azure), as its first fully supported container and Kubernetes platform.

Big Data Clusters is a set of capabilities introduced with the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 release. It allows you to deploy scalable clusters of containerized instances of SQL Server, Spark and the Hadoop Data File System (HDFS), with Kubernetes as the orchestration engine. The end result is a unified data platform, enabling you to read, write, and process big data from Transact-SQL or Spark, and achieve data driven business insights from the high-value relational data, with high-volume big data. The Big Data Clusters components shown in the diagram below require Linux containers to help package and isolate application and database services with their dependencies, making it easy to build & deploy them anywhere. The Big Data Cluster Architecture details are available here.

With Big Data Clusters on OpenShift, enterprise organizations can more securely deploy and manage a fully supported data analytics solution on the industry leading containers and Kubernetes platform. With integrated DevOps capabilities, OpenShift also allows extending DevOps to the entire Data Analytics & ML lifecycle, and enables collaboration across teams. The end result is the agility, scalability, flexibility, cross-cloud portability and security needed to roll out successful analytics/ML powered intelligent applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

Security is top of mind for every organization, and has been a key reason for organizations to select OpenShift as their Kubernetes platform for various application workloads. Red Hat and Microsoft engineers collaborated to develop detailed security guidelines for running Big Data Clusters on OpenShift as part of this joint solution. The Big Data Clusters on OpenShift security whitepaper can be downloaded here.

Here is the Microsoft blog with details on the Big Data Clusters support for OpenShift. And, here is a hot off the press Reference Architecture from our friends at HPE showing prescriptive solution architecture for designing and deploying Big Data Clusters on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and HPE Synergy platform. For technical details on Big Data Clusters, please visit here.

This extends our strategic collaboration with Microsoft on SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and is just the beginning of our joint collaboration on SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters. Stay tuned to learn more as we roll out Reference Architectures with our mutual infrastructure partners, and help organizations achieve business goals and objectives by operationalizing Big Data Clusters on OpenShift. 

Feel free to reach out to your Microsoft and Red Hat sales teams if you would like to have a deeper conversation on SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters on OpenShift and how the joint solution can help achieve your business goals and objectives.