Microsoft is now officially launching its long awaited Hardoop-based features for Windows Azure in a new service called Windows Azure HDInsight. The service has been in a public preview test since March but Microsoft is now saying it is ready for general availability.
In today's announcement, Microsoft's Quentin Clark, the Corporate Vice President of the company's Data Platform Group, stated that Windows Azure HDInsight offers the open source software benefits that Hardoop contains combined with the security and management features that Microsoft's services can provide. He added:
We have built it to integrate with Excel and Power BI – our business intelligence offering that is part of Office 365 – allowing people to easily connect to data through HDInsight, then refine and do business analytics in a turnkey fashion. For the developer, HDInsight also supports choice of languages: .NET, Java and more.
A number of customers are already using Windows Azure HDInsight, including a team of Virginia Tech computer scientists that are using it to create an on-demand, cloud-computing model for better access to DNA sequencing tools and resources.
Clark also announced that Microsoft has been working with Hortonworks on this project and that it will release HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform) 2.0 for Windows Server sometime in November; Hadoop v2 will also be supported in a future version of HDInsight.
Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft
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