WANdisco today announced it has made its WANdisco Distro (WDD) available for free download.

WDD is a production-ready version powered by Apache Hadoop 2 based on the most recent release, including the latest fixes. These certified Apache Hadoop binaries undergo the same quality assurance process as WANdisco's enterprise software solutions.

The WDD team is led by Dr. Konstantin Boudnik, who is one of the original Hadoop developers, has been an Apache Hadoop committer since 2009 and served as a Hadoop architect with Yahoo! This team of Hadoop development, QA and support professionals is focused on software quality. WANdisco's Apache Hadoop developers have been involved in the open source project since its inception and have the authority within the Apache Hadoop community to make changes to the code base, for fast fixes and enhancements.

By adding its active-active replication technology to WDD, WANdisco is able to eliminate the single points of failure (SPOFs) and performance bottlenecks inherent in Hadoop. With this technology, the same data is simultaneously readable and writable on every server, and every server is actively supporting user requests. There are no passive or standby servers with complex administration procedures required for failover and recovery.

In the event of a network or server outage, failover is immediate and recovery is automatic without administrator intervention. Wandisco has also stated that there is no downtime, even in the case of planned maintenance. These capabilities can be delivered across data centers over a Wide Area Network (WAN) as well as a Local Area Network (LAN).

"This is one of a number of Big Data product announcements WANdisco will be making between now and the upcoming Strata 2013 Big Data conference in Santa Clara, CA, February 26-28. It's a great time for enterprises requiring a hardened, non-stop Hadoop," said David Richards, CEO of WANdisco.

WANdisco is also announcing enterprise-class professional support for organizations deploying Hadoop clusters utilizing WDD. Services include online service request and case tracking, customer discussion forums, online access to service packs and patches.