Microsoft has announced that the Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0 for Windows is publicly available for download. HDP 2 for Windows is the only Apache Hadoop 2.0-based platform that is certified for production usage on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

This release makes HDP 2 for Windows available across all major operating systems. It provides Hadoop coverage for more than 99% of the enterprises in the world, according to Microsoft.

Unleashing YARN and Hadoop 2 on Windows
HDP 2.0 for Windows brings Apache Hadoop YARN to Windows. YARN enables a user to interact with all data in multiple ways simultaneously—for instance making use of both real-time and batch processing—making Hadoop a multi-use data platform and allowing it to take its place in a modern data architecture.

Windows data centers can now depend on a Highly Available NameNode to automatically detect and recover from any hardware, operating system or JVM faults and deliver reliable access to data to all HDP processing components.

Building on top of the next generation architecture of core Apache Hadoop, HDP 2.0 for Windows also provides:
• Phase 2 of the Stinger initiative – providing a significant increase in SQL semantics, adding the VARCHAR and DATE datatypes and improving performance ORDER by and GROUP by.
• Apache HBase 0.96 – delivering important enterprise features such as Snapshots and improved mean time to recovery (MTTR)
• The latest stable releases of the rest of the HDP stack, integrated and certified to run on top of YARN