“Cloudera customers have spoken clearly," said Ed Albanese, head of business development at Cloudera, on Thursday. "They want a Hadoop configuration that has been validated from end–to-end and is available from a single vendor. We are excited that Dell is investing to meet this demand."

Albanese was referring to the announcement by Cloudera and Dell of a Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop combines Dell servers and networking components with Cloudera’s distribution.

"Our relationship with Dell is a natural fit as we continue to expand the footprint of Apache Hadoop across mainstream commercial environments," Albanese continued. "Enterprises can now quickly and easily deploy an entire solution for Apache Hadoop that is optimized for production level environments."

Aimed at financial services, energy, utility and telecom companies, research institutions, retail businesses, and Internet/media groups, The Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop is aimed at reducing the complexity of deploying, configuring, and managing Hadoop systems. By combining the leading open source Apache Hadoop-based software platform and purpose-built hardware, the integrated Dell | Cloudera solution for Hadoop, the two companies say, "will enable organizations to analyze large amounts of complex, dynamic data at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than proprietary solutions."

Many companies today are recognizing the inherent value in analyzing the vast amount of structured and unstructured data currently being stored across their organization. Apache Hadoop enables companies to perform complex analyses, including detailed special-purpose computation across large collections of mixed data. However, deployment and management complexity, as well as requirements for highly specialized knowledge, have been barriers to adoption,” said Merv Adrian, Research VP, Information Management at Gartner. “Providing complete end-to-end solutions for Apache Hadoop deployments will be key to significantly speeding its adoption within mainstream enterprise environments.”

The Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop consists of CDH, Dell Crowbar software, and Cloudera Enterprise combined with a Dell PowerEdge C2100 server (other models to be added shortly) and PowerConnect 6248 48-port Gigabit Ethernet Layer 3 switch. Joint service and support and a deployment guide are also included. Available for purchase directly from Dell within the next 30 days.

“Dell is committed to providing our customers with the best solutions for expanding IT capabilities without creating additional management requirements. Our PowerEdge C servers are purpose-built for performing Big Data analytics. Through our relationship with Cloudera, companies can now take advantage of the leading distribution of Apache Hadoop along with Dell servers and networking capabilities to easily and quickly deploy an end-to-end solution for Hadoop,” said John Igoe, executive director of Cloud Solutions at Dell. Igoe continued:

“Organizations can begin solving business challenges by analyzing structured and unstructured data while knowing that they have the backing of Dell service and support and access to Cloudera training and management tools, all via a single point of contact.”