Dell Joins Hadoop Crowd With Cloudera Partnership

Dell on Aug. 4 joined the growing Apache Hadoop commercial implementators' club by announcing a new partnership with Cloudera -- by far the oldest and most production-utilized distribution of the celebrated open source data analytics package.

Cloudera's was the first commercial implementation of the open source data analytics package that came out of Yahoo's R&D division in 2006. For its part, Dell will supply new-generation PowerEdge C servers and networking components, services and its vast channel and sales networks to complete the new implementation.

Within those services, Dell will include management tools, training, technology support and other professional services.

"This is a defined reference architecture with a point of view that helps our customers very quickly identify a strategy for the implementation of a Hadoop presence inside of their corporation," Dell Executive Director of Cloud Solutions John Igoe told eWEEK.

"We see Cloudera is the leader in this particular space. Our vision was to combine their leadership in the Hadoop area with our leadership in hyperscale computing environments. We have a great deal of differentiation here by taking the abilities of both companies and putting them together."

Specifically, Dell/Cloudera for Apache Hadoop consists of Cloudera, Dell Crowbar software, and Cloudera Enterprise combined with a Dell PowerEdge C2100 server (other models will be added later) and PowerConnect 6248 48-port Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switch. Joint service (either Cloudera or Dell) and support and a deployment guide are also included.

Dell/Cloudera for Apache Hadoop can be used in many verticals but will be aimed first at financial services, energy, utility and telecom companies, research institutions, retail businesses, and Internet/media groups, Igoe said.

The new implementation is designed to reduce the complexity of deploying, configuring, and managing Hadoop systems that process large amounts of data enterprises can use to help manage themselves at a generally lower cost than older-school analytics packages and consultancies.

Making Hadoop More Usable Is the Goal

The bottom line is this: Hadoop is complicated software machinery to deploy and utilize, and it lacked a relatively usable front end until Cloudera and others came in to add their expertise. Dell's idea is to give customers a single source to deploy, manage, and scale a comprehensive Apache Hadoop-based stack, Igoe said.

There are a growing number of companies offering commercial implementations and/or providing support for Hadoop. Cloudera, IBM, Platform Computing were among the first to develop their own commercial Apache Hadoop implementations in recent years.  EMC, NetApp, SGI and Yahoo (with its Hortonworks spinoff) are some of the others.

Igoe said the new reference architecture and all its hardware will be available later in August.