March 16, 2009, 12:29 PM — A startup called Cloudera on Monday publicly released its distribution of the open-source Hadoop distributed computing framework, hoping to sell enterprise users on the system employed by Google, Yahoo and others to process large data sets.
Cloudera, which was launched by former Google, Yahoo, Oracle and Facebook employees last year, has been providing its initial customers with support for Hadoop.
"One of the repeating themes we have heard while working with our customers and the community is that Hadoop configuration and deployment is a pain," Cloudera employee and former Googler Christophe Bisciglia said in a blog post. "In order for Big Data to truly disrupt the enterprise, Hadoop needs to be just as easy to configure, deploy and manage as any other piece of software."
That is why Cloudera has decided to release its distribution, which is available as an RPM bundle for systems running Red Hat Linux, as well as an image for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The distribution is available at no charge, under the Apache 2 license. By releasing the package, Cloudera is no doubt hoping more enterprises take a look at using Hadoop and subsequently tap Cloudera's support services, for which pricing information was not immediately available Monday.
Cloudera's distribution has three components: the Hadoop distributed file system, which can run on commodity machines; an implementation of the MapReduce framework originally developed by Google for parallel processing of large data sets; and Hive, a data warehousing layer that uses the SQL-based HQL language for querying.
Also Monday, Cloudera said it had secured US$5 million in funding from Accel Partners along with other investors, including former MySQL and Sun executive Marten Mickos, LinkedIn president Jeff Weiner and Gideon Yu, chief financial officer at Facebook.
