MapR, the open source Big Data vendor, has had a busy week. On Feb. 11, it unveiled three new products related to Apache Hadoop and other Big Data technologies, including one that integrates the HP Vertica analytics platform into the MapR suite.

MapR made each of the announcements at the Strata conference in Santa Clara, Calif., which continues through Feb. 13. In Hadoop-related developments, the company unveiled the latest version of the MapR Hadoop distribution, its flagship product for Big Data workloads. The newest release of the distribution is based on Hadoop 2.2 with YARN and, as with previous MapR Hadoop distributions, stands out for closely maintaining the open source base of the Hadoop code. According to the company:

As a complement to the Hadoop distribution updates, MapR also announced a virtualized environment that developers can use for experimenting with Hadoop. MapR describes the product, which it calls Sandbox for Hadoop, as "the fastest onramp for Hadoop." Its central purpose is to promote Hadoop adoption by simplifying training, development and testing on the MapR Hadoop distribution within a virtualized environment, according to the company.

And last but not least—especially from a channel perspective—MapR also announced the HP Vertica Analytics Platform on MapR, which integrates HP's Vertica product for Big Data analytics with MapR Hadoop. This is also a move aimed at increasing Hadoop adoption by making it easier for developers and analysts to interact with Hadoop using the SQL programming interfaces they already know well. Unlike similar solutions that are already on the market, however, MapR's platform provides better performance by taking advantage of MapR Hadoop optimizations, while also offering a 100 percent ANSI SQL-compliant interface that goes far beyond the "incomplete, SQL-like approaches" of existing solutions, according to John Schroeder, CEO and cofounder, MapR Technologies.

HP Vertica Analytics Platform on MapR is in early-access mode now, and will become generally available in March.