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24 Hadoop RFI Questions

A Request for Information (RFI) should gather information about a prospective vendors corporate background and strategies,
as well as how they approach the five key components of Enterprise Hadoop: data management, data access, data governance and integration, security, and cluster operations. We collected a best of list from the many Hadoop RFIs that we
have reviewed and below we present a summary of the questions that can help you formulate your Hadoop RFI.

RFI Questions
CORPORATE BACKGROUND, BUSINESS MODEL, AND HADOOP PERSONALITY
Hadoop Expertise | How long have your technical leaders worked with Apache Hadoop?
Apache Leadership | How many of your engineers are Apache Software Foundation (ASF) committers and PMC members?
Open Source Philosophy | List components of your distribution that are governed by projects within the ASF and which are not.
Technology Partnerships | List technology partners whose platforms and apps integrate with your distribution.
Testing | Describe your testing and certification process, prior to releasing a new version of your distribution.
Open Community | Can we use the ASF community to self-support your solution? How quickly do ASF fixes make it into the software?
DATA MANAGEMENT
Data Volume | Describe how performance and storage pricing changes at different amounts of data.
High Availability | What HA features do you provide to minimize data center outages?
Portability & Deployment | What operating system(s) do you support? Can we deploy in the cloud? Can you support a hybrid environment?
DATA ACCESS
Extensibility | Would we be able to add new data applications that run in YARN? What YARN-ready ISV apps run on your platform?
Use Cases | Do you have customers that use your distribution for our use case? Articulate your use case(s).
Workloads | Can we simultaneously process data in many different ways (i.e. batch, interactive SQL query and real-time)?
Existing Skills | Will our analysts be able to use their existing SQL skills to query data in Hadoop?
DATA INTEGRATION AND GOVERNANCE
Data Ingest | How would you move our raw data sources into Hadoop?
Replication and Retention | Will we be able to set centralized policies for data replication and retention?
Pipeline Monitoring | How do we gain insight into source lineage of data in Hadoop? Can we set explicit policies for data flows?

24 Hadoop RFI Questions

2014 Hortonworks
www.hortonworks.com

SECURITY
Administration | Do you provide central administration of security policy within the cluster? How do you coordinate enforcement across workloads?
Authentication | How does your solution verify the identity of users and systems accessing the cluster?
Authorization | How do you provide fine-grain authorization to access data in the cluster?
Audit | How will we be able to audit the actions taken by individual users?
OPERATIONS
Provision | What operating system(s) do you support? What are our cloud/on-premises deployment options?
Manage | What tools do you provide for the ongoing management of a Hadoop cluster?
Monitor | Do you provide a single pane of glass to monitor all cluster components?
Extend | Can your management tool integrate with existing operations consoles?

Hortonworks Helps You Succeed with Hadoop

The YARN-based architecture of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) allows you to implement a single cluster with a shared
data set for mixed workloads that span batch, interactive SQL, and real-time use cases. HDP allows you to apply a comprehensive security policy across the entire Hadoop cluster and ensure that you have the consistent data governance and
operations that you need to integrate Hadoop wit h your existing data infrastructure.
Most importantly, we back our commitment to 100% open-source Enterprise Hadoop with more committers to Apache
projects than any other distribution. Those leading developers join our seasoned support team to deliver support that is
second to none.

For more information, visit: www.hortonworks.com/contact/sales

Call: (855) 8-HORTON

24 Hadoop RFI Questions

2014 Hortonworks
www.hortonworks.com