The Linux Foundation announced today that it is adding Platform for Network Data Analytics (PNDA) as a Linux Foundation project. PNDA provides users with an open source big data platform for network analytics.

PNDA’s vision is to remove the complexity of combining multiple technologies into an end-to-end system, using open source technology to provide a big data analytics platform. It has a streamlined data pipeline to surface the right data at the right time.

Based on big data architecture patterns, PNDA aggregates bulk data, distributing and processing it in real time. This lets users gain insight into big data network trends. The platform also manages the lifecycle of applications that process and analyze data.

Cisco, among a handful of other early supporters, is contributing code to enable platform provisioning and management, application packaging, and deployment. PNDA also complements open source software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and network orchestration projects including OpenDaylight, Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), and FD.io.

Future contributions from the open source community are expected to extend PNDA’s capabilities, such as Hadoop distribution independence, platform infrastructure validation, container support, additional data publishers, and deep learning framework integration to name a few.

Before Linux picked up PNDA, Hadoop was the among most noteworthy open source big data platforms, and it seems like Linux is moving quickly to support its capabilities.

In addition to Cisco, other PNDA supporters include Deepfield, FRINX, Intersec, Moogsoft, Ontology, OpenDataSoft, and Tupl.