WANdisco, a Silicon Valley firm that specializes in data replication software, announced the launch of its very own Hadoop distribution. WANdisco Distro (WDD) is available for free download from the company’s site.

The release comes less than three months after the company finalized its acquisition of Hadoop-specialist AltoStor. WDD is pegged as the “first fully tested, production-ready version powered by Apache Hadoop 2.” It’s based on the latest version of Hadoop, Hadoop 2.0, which the company says has passed same quality assurance process as WANdisco’s commercial products.  The company also says that its developers maintain an active role in the Hadoop community, which means that they keep their eyes peeled for the latest updates and bug fixes.

What sets WDD apart from the other free distributions out there is that it is ships with WANdisco’s patented active-active replication technology. According to the company, the main advantage of this integration is that Hadoop’s single point of failure (often referred to as SPOF) is eliminated. This translates into fewer bottlenecks in large-scale environments – particularly those that span datacenters across geographic locations – that need to process requests from multiple concurrent users.

“It’s a great time for enterprises requiring a hardened, non-stop Hadoop,” said David Richards, CEO of WANdisco. “Only our patented active-active technology removes the single point of failure inherent in Hadoop and works locally and globally. We are excited to have Dr. Konstantin Boudnik, one of the original developers of Hadoop, leading this rollout.”

We followed WANdisco’s ambitions to enter the analytics market since November last year, when it acquired AltoStor for nearly $6 million in order to tap into the startup’s engineering talent. Last month the company made its goals even clearer when it partnered up with Hortonworks and touted the advantages of its replication software for Hadoop users.

Richards and WANdisco CTO and VP Engineering of Big Data Jagane Sundar explained how the company’s technology tackles Hadoop’s SPOF and makes the framework safe for mission-critical applications with Wikibon’s Jeff Kelly last month.