Can Cloudera take Hadoop commercial?
Cloudera, a Burlingame, Calif. start-up, on Monday said that it has raised $5 million in venture funding and aims to take Hadoop, the open source software behind Facebook, Google and Facebook, to a data center near you.
Hadoop is open source software used to store and process petabytes of distributed information. It would obviously come in handy in a data center. The problem: Support.
Enter Cloudera, which wants to be the Red Hat of Hadoop (Techmeme, company statement, background portal). The game plan is to launch the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop and make money from service and support. Enterprises are already used to this model from dealing with Red Hat.
Pricing for this Cloudera roll-out of Hadoop was undisclosed.
For now Cloudera appears to be looking to distribute its Hadoop distribution as widely as possible. It is pre-packaged as a bundle for Red Hat Linux systems or as an Amazon EC2 image. Cloudera is also making a VMware image available along with its training.
If you're an enterprise Cloudera's distribution may be worth a look, but many companies prefer to allow other customers to be the early adopters. Cloudera's Hadoop distribution could be an important data center development, but will take some time to bake.
Nevertheless, Cloudera's executive team, disclosed in the statement about its funding from Accel Partners, indicates the company may have some staying power. Cloudera's founders include:
- CEO Mike Olson, who was vice president at Oracle and prior to that CEO at open source database pioneer Sleepycat Software;
- Christophe Bisciglia, who created and led Google's Academic Cloud Computing Initiative that partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to make Google-hosted Hadoop clusters available for research and education worldwide.
- Dr. Amr Awadallah, co-founder of VivaSmart, acquired by Yahoo where Dr. Awadallah served as vice president of engineering and used Hadoop extensively across the Yahoo.
- Jeff Hammerbacher, conceived, built, and led the data team at Facebook responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning as well as building out the infrastructure.