Red Hat Fleshes Out Hadoop-focused Big Data Plans

In addition to its focus on cloud computing, which will be led by an OpenStack-based distribution and robust support plans taking shape this year, Red Hat is also doublling down on its focus on Big Data. The company has announced that it "will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the ApacheTM Hadoop open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments." The goal is to be able to help companies put in place Big Data-crunching environments that work in conjunction with cutting-edge storage strategies.

All of Red Hat's focus in the cloud and Big Data arenas centers on hybrid clouds, as the company's announcement notes:

"Red Hat big data infrastructure and application platforms are ideally suited for enterprises leveraging the open hybrid cloud environment. Red Hat is working with the open cloud community to support big data customers. Many enterprises worldwide use public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon® Web Services (AWS), for the development, proof-of-concept, and pre-production phases of their big data projects. The workloads are then moved to their private clouds to scale up the analytics with the larger data set. An open hybrid cloud environment enables enterprises to transfer workloads from the public cloud into their private cloud without the need to re-tool their applications. Red Hat is actively engaged in the open cloud community through projects like OpenStack and OpenShift Origin to help meet these enterprise big data expectations both today and in the future."

As we've reported, Red Hat has already delivered early previews of its OpenStack-based cloud platform. The next shoe to drop in Red Hat's cloud strategy will be delivering the kind of aggressive support that it has offered for its Linux platform and other offerings. If it can deliver the best supported OpenStack solution and provide enterprises with comprehensive Big Data and storage features in tandem, it has a shot at competing with not only Amazon but with the other OpenStack- and Hadoop-focused vendors out there. 

You can read more about Red Hat's Big Data and storage integration strategy here.