Oracle has tapped Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, to provide an Apache Hadoop distribution and tools for Oracle’s newly announced Big Data Appliance.
Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.
Oracle has integrated Cloudera’s distribution including Apache Hadoop and Cloudera Manager software into its Big Data Appliance, a just launched engineered system designed to provide high performance and scalable data processing environments for Big Data. The appliance aims to help companies acquire, organize and to analyze massive amounts of enterprise data.
The appliance is a mixture of both hardware and software that leveraging Apache Hadoop and includes Cloudera Manager, an open source distribution of R, Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition, Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and Oracle Linux running on Oracle Sun servers.
In 2010, Cloudera partnered with Quest Software to produce and distribute an Oracle connector for Hadoop. The partnership is interesting considering that some think that an Oracle acquisition of Cloudera makes sense for the enterprise giant.