Previews of Microsoft's Hadoop-based solutions for Windows Azure and Windows Server, developed in conjunction with Hortonworks, are now available.

It was last November, at the SQL Server PASS Conference, that Microsoft announced that it had dropped Dryad, its own big data project but was working instead on a distribution of Hadoop for Azure and for Windows Server in partnership with Hortonworks, a commercial vendor of Hadoop,

At last month's Strata + Hadoop World, Microsoft unveiled the results of this collaboration and also announced an expanded partnership with Hortonworks to give customers access to its enterprise-ready distribution of Hadoop with the two new solutions, Windows Azure HDInsight Service and Microsoft HDInsight Server for Windows.

HDInsight can be integrated with Active Directory so administrators can extend access privileges across HDInsight from Active Directory, and the HDInsight clusters can be managed with System Center 2012. The service and server also offer connectivity to Microsoft Office Excel 2013 and Business Intelligence tools.

You can find out more and download previews of both HDInsight solutions on Microsoft Big Data page.