Today, at the Hadoop Summit, Microsoft is announcing that Azure HDInsight supports Hadoop 2.4. This is the next release of our 100 percent Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Microsoft Azure. This release of HDInsight provides order magnitude (up to 100x) performance improvements to query response times and continues to leverage the benefits of YARN. Finally, we are also providing an easy-to-use web interface that gives users of HDInsight a friendly experience. You can create queries with a graphical user interface over Hive.

For Azure customers that have data in Blobs, these new query performance improvements can help you gain insight on your data faster than before. HDInsight can mine your blob data to drive new business decisions. This can be to analyze clickstream data to send targeted marketing, log analysis to measure usage, or social sentiment from twitter to correlate with sales.

To see what other Azure customers have done with HDInsight over Azure Blobs read the CIO magazine spotlight who recently showcased several HDInsight customer stories. Examples include:

•  Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School is using HDInsight to process large amounts of unstructured log data and to maintain their stringent requirements of data retention (that can be as long as 30 years).
•  Virginia Polytechnic Institute is using the power of HDInsight to analyze massive amounts of DNA sequencing data.
• City of Barcelona use HDInsight to collect, analyze, and generate insights with data collected from social media feeds, GPS signals, and data from government systems.
• Blackball uses HDInsight to collect point-of-sale (POS) data and new types of data such as customer feedback via social media.
• Chr. Hansen use HDInsight to collect structured and unstructured data from sources like automated equipment (robots, temperature sensors, and other devices). With HDInsight, they were up and running in less than a week.

We invite you to learn more and to spin up HDInsight (Hadoop) over your data stored on Azure Blobs today:

• Try Azure HDInsight and spin up a Hadoop cluster in the cloud with 15 clicks or 20 minutes
• Read the How To Get Started material for Azure HDInsight
• Watch Channel 9’s Getting Started With HDInsight Video Series
• Read CIO magazine’s Windows Azure HDInsight customer story spotlight
• Read more about Microsoft’s involvement with Hadoop through Stinger and partnering with Hortonworks