Microsoft rolls out its R Server big-data analytics line-up

Microsoft quietly made available this week a new family of R Server data-analytics products.

Thanks to a tweet from Tero Alhonen, I found listings on MSDN for a family of new Microsoft R Server products with January 4, 2016 release dates.

The new line-up includes:

• Microsoft R Server for Hadoop on Red Hat
• Microsoft R Server for Teradata DB
• Microsoft R Server for Red Hat Linux
• Microsoft R Server for SuSE Linux
• RRE, which is Revolution R Enterprise, I believe. (Thanks, Marko!)

Here's the description on MSDN as to what these R servers are:

"Microsoft R Server is a fast and cost-effective enterprise-class big data advanced analytics platform supporting a variety of big data statistics, predictive modeling and machine learning capabilities. Microsoft R Server includes Open Source R and is fully compatible with R scripts, functions and CRAN packages, and offers a variety of analytics capabilities including exploratory data analysis, model building and model deployment."

R is a programming language for computational statistics. Microsoft last April completed its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, the maker of a distribution of the R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics, for an undisclosed amount.

Microsoft previously announced it plans to build R support directly into SQL Server 2016. Microsoft also announced last year plans to integrate Revolution's R distribution into the Azure HDInsight and Azure Machine Learning services.

Microsoft execs also said last year they would continue to support the open-source evolution of R, as well as the commercial distributions of Revolution R across multiple platforms, including Linux, Teradata and Hadoop.

I believe the new R Server products available to MSDN subscribers are the renamed versions of the promised commercial distributions of Revolution R. I've asked Microsoft officials for clarification, pricing and more details. No word back so far.