Pivotal and Hortonworks to Collaborate on Hadoop Management Tools

Pivotal and Apache Hadoop distro provider Hortonworks have teamed up to collaborate on an open source project called Apache Ambari, which provides tools and APIs to provision, manage and monitor Hadoop clusters. The collaboration looks to strengthen Hadoop as an enterprise offering and to advance the Hadoop ecosystem.

Ambari's aimed at making Hadoop operations simpler through a standard management tool. There is a wealth of interest and investment in Hadoop, and many vendors are focused on making the open source distributed computing architecture user-friendly - an aim that provides the basis of the Ambari project.

In a boost to efforts to make Hadoop more palatable for enterprises, Hortonworks recently landed a $50 million equity investment from HP. Now it gains another strong partner in the form of Pivotal, the EMC and VMware company led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Pivotal aims squarely at the enterprise software developer, and enterprise Hadoop is a big component of its play. It is invested heavily in Hadoop, for which it has its own distribution, and complementary modules, such as HAWQ, GemFire XD and Pivotal Command Center.

“Apache Hadoop projects are central to our efforts to drive the most value for the enterprise,” Jamie Buckley, vice president of product management at Pivotal. “An open source, extensible and vendor-neutral application to manage services in a standardized way benefits the entire ecosystem. It increases customer agility and reduces operational costs and can ultimately help drive Hadoop adoption.”

Pivotal is expanding its open source investment by dedicating Pivotal engineers to contribute installation, configuration and management capabilities to Ambari. At the same time, Pivotal will continue to deliver on commitments to existing customers and work closely with them to help them benefit from this collaboration.

Shaun Connolly, vice president of strategy at Hortonworks, said, “Pivotal has a strong record of contribution to open source and has proven their commitment with projects such as Cloud Foundry, Spring, Redis and more.  Collaborating with Hortonworks and others in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem to further invest in Apache Ambari as the standard management tool for Hadoop will be quite powerful. Pivotal’s track record in open source overall and the breadth of skills they bring will go a long way towards helping enterprises be successful, faster, with Hadoop.”