Hortonworks, the buzzed-about Big Data startup that spun out of Yahoo in 2011, announced today the availability of its latest Hadoop distribution for Windows. The Linux edition of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.0 hit the market a little less than three months ago.

As the name implies, the distro is based on Apache Hadoop 2.0, which replaces the MapReduce batch processing framework featured in previous releases with YARN. Dubbed by some as MapReduce 2.0, the technology detaches resource management and scheduling functionality from the core data processing component to enable near real time analytics. It’s also more efficient and provides improved support for large datasets.

“HDP 2.0 for Windows is a leap forward as it brings the power of Apache Hadoop YARN to Windows. YARN enables a user to interact with all data in multiple ways simultaneously – for instance making use of both realtime and batch processing – making Hadoop a true multi-use data platform and allowing it to take its place in a modern data architecture,” Hortonworks head of marketing John Kreisa wrote in a blog.

In addition to taking advantage of YARN, HDP 2.0 also eliminates the single point of failure inherent in older versions by making it possible to set up a standby metadata server for rapid recovery. Other notable additions include HBase 0.96, which introduces much-needed enterprise capabilities like snapshotting, and Phase 2 of the Stinger query acceleration tool.

Kreisa boasted that company’s platform is the first and currently only distribution certified for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 environments. The startup didn’t specify whether Azure HDInsight, Microsoft’s cloud-based edition of HDP, has been updated or whether it still uses the 1.0 release.