HP, Cloudera Extend Hadoop Ties, Plan Appliance

Notch yet another partnership for Hadoop software and services provider Cloudera, as it announced Thursday a deal through which HP will resell the Cloudera Enterprise platform along with its hardware and an HP Hadoop appliance set for release in the fourth quarter.

Cloudera and HP were already partnered, but the agreement and coming appliance will make it easier for joint HP and Cloudera customers to get Hadoop clusters up and running quickly, according to executives at the two companies.

"Customers need to get to proof of concept and into production as fast as possible, and being a [Cloudera] reseller helps us give customers a simple, repeatable methodology for procuring and standing up Hadoop solutions," Paul Miller, VP of converged application systems at HP, told InformationWeek.

The partnership makes purchasing simpler because HP will furnish everything the customer needs, including Cloudera's software and its own Proliant x86 servers and HP storage and networking hardware. The repeatability stems from an Apache Hadoop for Cloudera reference architecture that HP announced in June.

[ Want more on Cloudera? Read Cloudera Releases Next-Generation Hadoop Platform. ]

The HP Hadoop appliance to be released in the fourth quarter will see Cloudera's software preinstalled along the HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop, which includes HP Insight Cluster Manager Utility software.

The partnership puts yet more feet on the street offering Cloudera Enterprise, the vendor's Apache Hadoop software distribution combined with enterprise support and Cloudera Enterprise 4.0, its deployment, monitoring, and systems management software for Hadoop. Cloudera has already partnered with a who's who list of IT vendors, including IBM, Informatica, MicroStrategy, Teradata, and more.

None of Cloudera's partnerships are more important than Oracle, the relational database and data warehousing market leader that chose Cloudera to provide the Hadoop software for its Oracle Big Data Appliance. How sweet is it for Cloudera to have both Oracle and HP, Oracle's former hardware partner turned foe and legal adversary, reselling Cloudera software and services?

Cloudera also has partnerships with Acer, Dell, NetApp, SGI, Supermicro, and others. So what's different about what HP can offer to those interested in running Hadoop?

Miller cited HP Converged Infrastructure (enterprise architecture), the HP Insight Cluster Manager Utility, and integrations with the HP's Vertica (analytics database) platform and HP Autonomy (search) software as differentiators.

"Hadoop is a great place for storing data, but tools for analytics are still years behind that advanced analytics that we have with Vertica and the human-information analysis that we can do with Autonomy," Miller said, noting Autonomy's ability to work with high-scale voice, video, and text. Miller also pointed out that HP has big-data-related partnerships with Microsoft, MapR, and VMware and will remain open to others.

HP's planned approach to supporting Hadoop clusters and the coming Hadoop appliance running Cloudera mirrors the approach outlined by Oracle and Cloudera: HP will provide the first line of support and will seamlessly hand off deeper problems it can't handle to Cloudera's support team.

As for HP's Insight Cluster Management Utility, Cloudera's Tim Stevens, VP of business and corporate development, told InformationWeek that the software is completely complementary to Cloudera's systems management and monitoring software. Cloudera Manager manages the performance and the workloads within the total Hadoop environment whereas HP's tool is more focused on hardware deployment and management.

Stevens also said Cloudera is only too happy to deepen its partnership with HP. "This is a very big market, and there are a lot of customers who can benefit from this technology," he said. "From our perspective, it's about giving customers maximum flexibility to address their business problem."