Hortonworks Sandbox — the Fastest On Ramp to Apache Hadoop

Hortonworks Sandbox — the Fastest On Ramp to Apache Hadoop:

Go from Zero to Big Data in 15 Minutes!

Today Hortonworks announced the availability of the Hortonworks Sandbox, an easy-to-use, flexible and comprehensive learning environment that will provide you with fastest on-ramp to learning and exploring enterprise Apache Hadoop.
The Hortonworks Sandbox is:

• A free download
• A complete, self contained virtual machine with Apache Hadoop pre-configured
• A personal, portable and standalone Hadoop environment
• A set of hands-on, step-by-step tutorials that allow you to learn and explore Hadoop on your own

The Hortonworks Sandbox is designed to help close the gap between people wanting to learn and evaluate Hadoop, and the complexities of spinning up an evaluation cluster of Hadoop. The Hortonworks Sandbox provides a powerful combination of hands-on, step-by-step tutorials paired with an easy to use Web interface designed to lower the learning curve for people who just want to explore and evaluate Hadoop, as quickly as possible.
One of our key focus areas is enabling Hadoop as an enterprise-viable platform that is easy to use and consume by our customers and the broader ecosystem. Over the past year or so, we have seen the complex and disjointed experience people face trying to learn Hadoop, and with the Sandbox, it allows you to have the fastest onramp to Apache Hadoop. We want the Sandbox to deliver an integrated, easy-to-use, easily updateable learning environment. Ongoing updates to the tutorials are planned, delivering new, interesting hands-on exercises, exploring different features and use cases.
These tutorials are built based on the experience gained training thousands of people in our Hortonworks University Training classes. As we continue to build out the Sandbox, we will provide additional levels of sophistication – think of it as the Hadoop 101, 201 and 301 levels of learning. And, the process of updating the tutorials is easy through the click of the “Update” button, initiating a lightweight download of just the tutorial content.
The Sandbox is a single node implementation of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 1.2 that behaves just like a normal Hadoop environment, which allows you to add your own datasets in an isolated protected environment to evaluate the use of Hadoop in your own data architectures.
Use the Sandbox to:

• Explore Hadoop on your own
• Plan out the integration points of your proof of concept project
• Prepare for a more complex pilot deployment

When you are ready, you can download and deploy the Hortonworks Data Platform with the confidence that you have thought through exactly how and where Hadoop can help.
What can you expect from us in the coming months with the Hortonworks Sandbox?

1. Join us for a special launch webinar on February 5, “Go from Zero to Big Data in 15 Minutes“. I will be hosting this webinar with one of our awesome Solution Engineers who will give you a sneak peek at some cool use cases for the Sandbox.
2. New tutorials released on roughly a monthly basis.
3. Demos and exercises of the integration with the tools and applications from our eco-system partners like Teradata, Alteryx, Datameer, and Microsoft. How cool would it be to run Excel on top of a personal Hadoop environment?? Well, that’s coming, so check back often.

I’m excited that you will be able to go from Zero to Big Data in 15 Minutes in a simple, easy-to-use fashion. And, I’m eager to hear your feedback – please let me know what you think of the Sandbox, what kinds of tutorials you would like to see and I would love to hear about your creative uses of the Sandbox. Leave your comments on this blog, Tweet out using #hwsandbox, comment in the Sandbox Forum, or email. The Hortonworks Sandbox is free and available for download here.