Nebulous No More: Cloudera Is A Game-Changer

software

Cloudera, backed by $5 million in venture funding by some really big names in the IT industry, offers a commercial version of Hadoop, the open-source, Java-based software that manages data-intensive applications and large data sets running across clusters of computers.

IT vendors of all kinds have been quick to jump on the bandwagon and reposition their hardware, software, storage systems, networking gear and services to be critical elements for cloud computing. It happens with every significant trend and shift in the IT industry and often—pardon the pun—clouds the issue. Just how does an aging legacy technology fit into the move toward (insert latest trend here)?

That's been the case with cloud computing. With the possible exception of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), most cloud computing technology out there today is little more than product repositioning.

Cloudera could change that. Sunday the company released its first commercial product, the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. A project of the Apache Software Foundation, Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google's MapReduce and Google File System technology. MapReduce is what Google uses to process search requests across huge numbers of distributed Linux servers.

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Hadoop has the potential to make cloud computing a reality by helping businesses tap into distributed resources via the Web. But deploying, configuring and managing the open-source software is difficult, as Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia noted in a blog on the company's Web site Sunday in which he formally announced the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop. Cloudera intends to remedy the hassles with Hadoop by offering standard Linux service management, simple Web-based configuration assistance, and other features and services.

The Cloudera distribution, based on Hadoop 0.18.3, is distributed under the Apache 2 software license for Red Hat Linux systems or an Amazon EC2 image as an RPM (Red Hat Package Management System) bundle.

While the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop technology itself holds a lot of promise, the names associated with the startup and the credibility they lend to the cloud computing concept are equally important. Along with former Google executive Bisciglia, Cloudera's founders include Mike Olsen, former CEO of open-source database developer Sleepy Cat and a vice president at Oracle after Oracle acquired Sleepy Cat in 2006, and Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the data team at Facebook.

Equally impressive is the roster of financial backers. While part of the $5 million Series A financing came from the Accel Partners venture capital firm, other investors include VMware founder Mendel Rosenblum, former VMware CEO Diane Greene, Microsoft Online Services Group President Qi Lu, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, LinkedIn President Jeff Weiner and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu.