NetApp stepped up its big data play a notch at this week’s Hadoop Summit, where it introduced a couple of new offerings that will undoubtedly reinforce the company’s foothold in this space.

The first update is that the storage vendor has entered into a strategic alliance with Hortonworks to flesh out HDC, the partner-centric Hadoop distribution that the latter unveiled earlier this week. The specifics were left out of the release, although the wait may not be as bad as it seems.

NetApp took the opportunity to not only announce the new technology alliance but also debut the Open Solution for Hadoop Rack. The integrated solution is not unique in that it brings together networking, compute, and storage resources in the same box; what differentiates it is that, according to maker, the offering is specifically optimized for Hadoop deployments and data driven workloads.  It’s powered by the company’s E-Series and ONTAP software.

“Our strategic relationship with Hortonworks and our new NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop Rack align with our strategy to partner with best-of-breed companies to deliver integrated solutions that give our customers greater flexibility and interoperability,” said Rich Clifton, senior vice president, Solutions and Integrations Group, NetApp.”

The upcoming joint solutions are expected to arrive sometime later this year. That, however, doesn’t mean NetApp has run out of cards to pull out of its sleeve just yet.

Also this week, the firm launched the Dynamic Disk Pools, a data protection app that carries out ‘dynamic reconstructions of failed drives’ that are touted as eight time faster than traditional RAID architectures. NetApp also claims that the utility, developed for E-Series deployments, can reduce the impact of fail drives on a company’s infrastructure by up to 60 percent.