Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization 6, a comprehensive platform for data integration and unified access across disparate data sources that is designed to turn big data into actionable information.

Data is spread throughout organizations in various big data and traditional stores such as Apache Hadoop, relational databases and NoSQL stores such as MongoDB. Integrating and transforming data from these disparate stores can be a challenge to access or productively use. The difficulty of making this data accessible to external applications, such as analytics and business intelligence software, can be a barrier to effectively leveraging these technologies to extract valuable and actionable information from the data. JBoss Data Virtualization helps solve this problem by allowing for simultaneous access to these disparate stores.

Red Hat further helps customers overcome these challenges through collaboration with industry leaders such as Hortonworks, the leading contributor to and provider of enterprise Apache Hadoop. Combining the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) with JBoss Data Virtualization integrates Hadoop with existing data sources and creates business-friendly virtual data models for improved access by external applications.

JBoss Data Virtualization provides fast, native out-of-the-box connectivity to various data sources with diverse access methods and storage models. Data from these sources is abstracted and presented in a way that frees developers to focus on the creation and delivery of their applications without having to know the technical and compatibility nuances associated with each data source and type.

JBoss Data Virtualization supports a range of IT projects and initiatives:
• Self-Service Business Intelligence: A virtual, reusable data model provides business-friendly representation of data, allowing users to interact with data without needing to know the complexities of its structure or location and allowing multiple BI tools to acquire data from a centralized data layer.
• Unified 360◦ View: Deliver a complete view of master and transactional data in real-time. The virtual data layer serves as a unified, enterprise-wide view of business information that improves users’ ability to understand and leverage enterprise data.
• Agile SOA Data Services: A data virtualization layer delivers data services to service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. JBoss Data Virtualization accelerates the creation of data services that encapsulate data access logic and allows multiple business services to acquire data from a centralized data layer, resulting in a looser coupling between business services and physical data sources.
• Better Compliance Control: A data virtualization layer delivers data firewall functionality. Data virtualization improves data quality with centralized access control, robust security and a reduction in physical copies of data. The metadata repository catalogs enterprise data locations and the relationships between data elements in constituent data stores, simplifying auditing and analysis.

Data-driven enterprises can maximize the business value of their data by establishing the organization, processes and infrastructure necessary to manage data as a strategic asset, allowing relevant, trusted data to be delivered quickly when, where and how needed to support the changing needs of the business. JBoss Data Virtualization technology provides lean and agile transformation of fragmented data into actionable information to thrive in the data-driven economy.

Feature highlights in JBoss Data Virtualization 6 include:

• Big data and cloud data integration through support for Hadoop, NoSQL databases, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid and a tech preview of MongoDB as data sources;
• Business dashboard to quickly build reports and visualize data;
• Enhanced developer productivity through a graphical virtual data model design tool integrated with Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, SQL-DDL-based virtual database definitions, import/reuse functions, and support for native queries;
• Simplified deployment and packaging with Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP).

JBoss Data Virtualization 6 is available for download now.