Today Microsoft Announced great plans about Hadoop adoption to deliver enterprise class Apache Hadoop based distributions on both Windows Server and Windows Azure.

See Announcement 

Microsoft will provide simplified download, installation and configuration experience of several Hadoop related technologies i.e.

• HDFS: http://hadoop.apache.org/hdfs/
• Hive: http://hive.apache.org/
• Pig: http://pig.apache.org/

The Hadoop based service for Windows Azure will allow any developer or user to submit and run standard Hadoop jobs directly on the Azure cloud with a simple user experience. The central ides is that you should be able to take any standard Hadoop job and deploy it on our platform, without considering what platform you have developing your Hadoop jobs.

What is for developers:

• Enable integration with Microsoft developer tools
• Investment in making Javascript a first class language for Big Data.
• Making it possible by writing high performance Map/Reduce jobs using Javascript.

What is for end users:

• Hadoop-based applications targeting the Windows Server and Windows Azure platforms
• The applications will easily work with Microsoft’s existing BI tools like PowerPivot and Power View
• Providing an ODBC Driver and an Add-in for Excel, each of which will interoperate with Apache Hive, to enable self-service analysis on business information

Released today: Two new connectors to enable customers, work effectively with both structured and unstructured data.

• SQL Server connector for Apache Hadoop lets customers move large volumes of data between Hadoop and SQL Server 2008 R2
• SQL Server PDW connector for Apache Hadoop moves data between Hadoop and SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). 

Visit:

• http://www.microsoft.com/bigdata
• http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/big-data-solution.aspx
• http://blogs.technet.com/b/port25/archive/2011/10/11/microsoft-hadoop-and-big-data.aspx