Dell jumps on heavy analytics with Hadoop

Dell has tuned up its PowerEdge servers to support a Hadoop stack aimed at businesses with heavy-duty analytics demands. 

The hardware maker announced Wednesday that it had teamed up with Apache Hadoop service provider, Cloudera, to deliver its preconfigured enterprise Hadoop cluster. 

The tie-up is meant to reduce the complexity of deploying Hadoop for financial services, retailers, utilities, telecoms providers and research institutes that need to crunch numbers on large amounts of structured and unstructured data. 

The major contributor to Hadoop is Yahoo!, which uses the cluster across its operations.

Facebook claims to have the world’s largest Hadoop distributed file system cluster in the world which hit 30 petabytes in July during its migration to a new data centre. Hadoop underpins Facebook's Ad Network and other analytics driven products.

EMC went down the commercial Hadoop path last May, launching an Hadoop appliance based on a set of technologies by recent acquisition Greenplum. 

The Dell-Cloudera Hadoop platform includes Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop (CDH) and management tools, as well as Dell’s PowerEdge C2100 server and PowerConnect 6248 48-port Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switch. 

The package also includes Dell’s Crowbar software, a cloud management platform it open sourced at the launch of its OpenStack Cloud solution in July. 

The platform will be available in 30 days, according to the joint statement.