Revolution Analytics’ flagship product, Revolution R Enterprise, has been rebranded as Microsoft R Server. In addition to Windows, Microsoft R Server runs on Linux (SUSE/Red Hat), Hadoop (Red Hat only), and Teradata DB.
The primary advantage of Revolution R Enterprise is performance. Its parallel architecture allows for larger datasets to be processed than would be feasible with the open source version of R.
Performance can even be further increased with the Hadoop and Teradata versions. By running R inside Hadoop or Teradata, you eliminate the need to move massive amounts of data across the network. Instead, the R script is sent to the nodes, greatly reducing network bandwidth.
One of the selling points is “transparent parallelism”, which means that developers can write standard R scripts and the parallelization is injected at runtime. In a way this is like how SQL automatically parallelizes queries, but instead of just distributing it across cores it can also distribute it across nodes in a cluster.
Developer editions Microsoft R Server for all five platforms are available for free. A full version is also available for academic use to members of the Microsoft DreamSpark program. This replaces the Academic Institution Program (AIP) and Public Service Program (PSP) that Revolution Analytics previously offered.