A significant component to the big data and open hybrid cloud direction Red Hat announced on Feb. 20 is our collaboration with leading big data software and hardware providers to offer enterprise features and interoperability. The intended result of this community-driven innovation will be a set of co-developed reference architectures that provide enterprise customers with comprehensive big data solutions. In a press release from Intel today announcing Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software, Red Hat has extended its strategic collaboration with Intel to jointly innovate and develop enterprise big data solutions through the open source community.

As the first step in its big data collaboration, Red Hat plans to build solutions using Intel Distribution integrated with Red Hat solutions, such as Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Big data solutions resulting from the expanded Red Hat and Intel alliance will be designed to meet enterprise expectations for availability, performance, and compatibility.

As we described on Feb. 20, Red Hat plans to work closely with a small set of pilot customers to develop several certified reference architectures. In parallel, we are working through Red Hat ecosystem partners to enable them to deliver these certified solutions to big data enterprise customers. Also, Red Hat announced it intends to make its Hadoop plug-in for Red Hat Storage available to the Hadoop community later this year. Currently in technology preview, the Red Hat Storage Apache Hadoop plug-in provides a new storage option for enterprise Hadoop deployments that delivers enterprise storage features while maintaining the API compatibility and local data access the Hadoop community.

Our goal is to evolve the Red Hat product portfolio, including Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, toward the open hybrid cloud model our enterprise big data customers desire, which includes working closely with partners such as Intel. The open source community projects Red Hat is involved in, including OpenStack and OpenShift Origin, aim to enable enterprises to utilize the open hybrid cloud model by moving big data workloads easily between public and private clouds. Red Hat is excited to work with Intel and the big data community to innovate and rapidly evolve solutions for enterprise customers.