OpenStack Summit: Red Hat, Mirantis, Hortonworks Partner on Hadoop

Everyone seems to be getting in line to build out cloud-based Big Data solutions around Apache Hadoop. At OpenStack Summit, three companies unveiled a partnership that is intending to help organizations simplify the deployment of Hadoop on OpenStack-based public and private clouds. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Mirantis and Hortonworks plan to provide open source APIs and simpler transitions when moving to Hadoop.

This announcement follows not two months after Red Hat unveiled its own Hadoop Big Data strategy. In February, the open source company known mostly for its Linux distribution outlined its five Big Data "must haves" in a brand new Hadoop strategy.

Its partners in this latest venture Mirantis, a large OpenStack integrator, and Hortonworks, which is a contributor to the Hadoop framework. Hortonworks seems to be the lead here in a plan to "contribute significantly" to Project Savanna. Through the partnership, they'll use OpenStack community guidelines to deliver Hadoop on the open source cloud platform. Savanna was originally developed by Mirantis.

"As enterprises and service providers look to big data as a competitive differentiator and the open hybrid cloud as an innovation platform, Hadoop deployments can accelerate OpenStack adoption and benefit from consistent interfaces across public and private cloud implementations," said Greg Kleiman, director of Strategy for Storage at Red Hat, in a prepared statement. "Red Hat is committed to working on Project Savanna within the OpenStack Foundation to make it simpler for enterprises to move Big Data workloads between public and private clouds easily and cost-effectively."

The technology isn't ready for prime time yet. The trio said they expect to have the new technology ready for demonstration at the Hadoop Summit in June in San Jose. Not a bad way to create a link between the conferences, really.

Earlier this month, a different partnership was formed to bring Hadoop to OpenStack. As we reported on April 1 (but it was no joke), MapR and Canonical formed a partnership to ease Hadoop deployments on Ubuntu Linux and OpenStack.

Vendors and cloud integrators are increasingly talking about Hadoop in the cloud, but the real question remains as to how much revenue is currently being generated and where the channel opportunities will lie in the future. Expect to see more of these kinds of partnerships in the future.