Hortonworks has announced Hortonworks Sandbox, a single node instance of the company's Hadoop distribution Hortonworks Data Platform 1.2, which is designed to give new users an easy-to-learn introduction to the software. The company calls its new offering the "fastest on-ramp to learning and exploring enterprise Apache Hadoop" and says it was designed based on experiences gained from their Hadoop training classes.

The virtual machine image includes step-by-step tutorials that train users in the use of the distributed computing framework. Tutorials for intermediate and advanced users are planned, with new tutorials to be released "on roughly a monthly basis". These will be able to be downloaded from within the Sandbox. The company says Hortonworks Sandbox behaves like a normal Hadoop environment where users can add their own datasets to an isolated configuration that they can safely explore without the risk of causing problems in an actual installation.

Hortonworks Sandbox is available for download for Windows 7 and Mac OS X from the Hortonworks web site. Registration is required to access the downloads and the images need VirtualBox 4.2 or VMware Fusion/Player 5.0 or later and a minimum of 4GB RAM to run. Hortonworks is also planning a launch webinar which will explain use cases for the sandbox on 5 February at 6pm GMT.

(fab)