sqrrl is collecting Big Data partners almost as fast as an actual squirrel collects nuts. Today, the Cambridge, Mass.-based start-up behind Accumulo, an open source NoSQL database with a focus on security and scalability, announced a new relationship with Hadoop distribution vendor Hortonworks.

Accumulo is now being certified to run on the Hortonworks Data Platform, a 100% open source Hadoop distribution that itself hit the market just a few months ago. The sqrrl-Hortonworks announcement comes just a few weeks after sqrrl inked a similar deal with MapR to run Accumulo on its enterprise Hadoop distribution, M5.

“This [Hortonworks] partnership will bring new Big Data capabilities to a wide variety of industries that use Accumulo,” said Oren Falkowitz, CEO and co-founder of sqrrl. “Customers can now leverage Hortonworks’ Hadoop expertise and combine it with our ability to securely bring data together and support low latency user interaction at scale.”

Accumulo began life at the National Security Agency in 2008. The NSA was in need of a secure, scalable, high-performance database that could process multi-structured data, but at the time there were no such products on the market. So Falkowitz, then an analyst at the agency, set out to build one. The result is what today is Apache Accumulo.

Oren Falkowitz, CEO and Co-Founder, sqrrl

Falkowitz left the NSA in July to found sqrrl, which offers a commercial version of Accumulo it calls Acorn. sqrrl is positioning Acorn as a potential replacement of HBase, another open source NoSQL database popular in Hadoop deployments. While both databases are designed to scale to thousands of machines while maintaining a relatively high level of consistency, Accumulo has significantly more robust security capabilities, according to Jeff Kelly, Big Data Analyst at Wikibon.

Specifically, Accumulo was designed with native cell-level security, which gives administrators the ability to assign user access permissions down to the cell-level, according to Kelly. This allows administrators to integrate large volumes of data in Accumulo while remaining in compliance with various regulatory and privacy requirements.

“Hadoop as a Big Data platform has received criticism for its lack of security capabilities, so it makes sense that MapR and now Hortonworks are partnering with Sqrrl,” says said Kelly. “Cell-level security allows administrators to mash-up multiple data sources while staying in compliance with myriad regulatory requirements. This is an important area for enterprises in highly regulated industries that would like to take advantage of Hadoop but until now we’re put off by its lack of granular security controls.”

Speaking exclusively to Wikibon CEO and Chief Analyst Dave Vellante last month, sqrrl’s Falkowitz explained how cell-level security translates into value for both administrators and end-users: “[Cell-level security] creates two advantages. The first is reduced administrative burdens of separating and fracturing  your data sets. And secondly it opens up the possibility for applications and analytics to run across more data than ever before.”

The partnerships benefit sqrrl’s customers by providing seemless integration with the Hadoop Distributed File System, which is commonly used to store large volumes of raw, unstructured data.

Below is Vellante’s full interview with Falkowitz: