At the Red had Summit 2013 yesterday, Hortonworks and Red Hat announced an engineering collaboration to advance open source big data community projects. The engineering partnership will be a collaboration effort on enabling more storage file systems to work with Apache Hadoop. In order to accelerate the enablement of the broader file system ecosystem being used with Apache Hadoop, the engineering teams at Hortonworks and Red Hat will be working directly with the Apache Hadoop Community.
 

“Red Hat, Hortonworks, and the entire Apache Hadoop Community have a tremendous opportunity to help customers bring Hadoop analytics to a larger portion of the big data residing in the enterprise. This collaboration will focus on developing open software-defined storage from Red Hat as a Hadoop-compatible file system managed with Hortonworks’ Data Platform including the open Ambari framework, which we expect to be an absolute game-changer by providing an easy, fast and cost-effective solution for enterprise big data customers,” Greg Kleiman, Director, Strategy Red Hat Storage

 
Also announced, the integration and support of Hortonworks Data Platform with Red Hat Storage. In a nut shell, two pees in a pod. The integration allows Hadoop to run directly on a POSIX-compliant storage node and it can reduce Hadoop cluster costs by up to 50 percent.

From the announcement, it’s said to have three areas of focus:

1. Enhance the Apache Ambari project
2. Creation of generic test suites to validate compatibility between Hadoop and alternative file systems
3. Both companies are working to integrated Hortworks Data Platform with Red Hat Storage so that enterprise customers will be able to process stored data on Red Hat Storage.

Enhance the Apache Ambari project.

 
The Apache Ambari project is an open source project which revolves around monitoring and managing Hadoop with storage systems. The idea around Ambari is to provision, deploy and monitor file systems. With this integration, users will be able to provision, deploy, monitor and manage alternative file systems with Ambari. The source code is 100 percent open and available to the entire Apache community.
 

Creation of generic test suites to validate compatibility between Hadoop and alternative file systems.

 
Hortonworks and Red Hat will create testing suites to the open source community to validate compatibility between Hadoop and alternative file systems.
 

Big objective: Integrating Hortworks Data Platform with Red Hat Storage so that enterprise customers will be able to process stored data.

 
Since Red Hat Storage is POSIX-compliant, it makes it easy to connect to the enterprise applications and run Hadoop analytics on enterprise data to reduce duplication of data and save costs.
 

Hortonworks is dedicated to bringing a 100-percent open source Hadoop to the enterprise and our engineering-level relationship with Red Hat and other leading technology vendors helps ensure the integration of the Hortonworks Data Platform with existing enterprise infrastructures. By driving innovation through the open communities, we look forward to working with Red Hat to increase overall open source Apache Hadoop adoption in the enterprise. This collaboration only increases the already rapid pace of community-driven innovation happening around Hadoop, Greg Pavlik, Vice President of Egineering, Hortonworks.

 
With this announcement, Red Hat and Hortonworks are tying storage into OpenStack — continuing to move the ball down the field on open source big data.