Skytap, the cloud platform that offers virtual lab automation as a service, now has pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) templates in its library that can be used to spin up and manage physical or virtual clusters of up to 50 Hadoop nodes.

With complexity removed, the company claims a 10-node system should take no more than 10 minutes to deploy. In Cloudera system one node is always dedicated to Cloudera Manager.

The templates eliminate the time required to manually download, install, configure and network all of the required software and hardware components together.

Skytap expects the widgetry to be used for Hadoop experimentation or to test and develop prototypes and proofs-of-concept for Big Data offerings. It says if users go production they should use their own infrastructure.

It requires a Skytap subscription. Users will be charged by the number of concurrent VMs deployed and the amount of time they spend on the Skytap infrastructure. The Cloudera edition on offer is the freebie one.

Skytap's templates let users create, spin up, suspend, save and tear down Hadoop clusters of various sizes on-demand. They're supposed to provide complete multi-machine, multi-networked environments, and enable users with fast, remote access and root-level control of all virtual machines.

Using its multi-VPN capability, Skytap customers can create a secure hybrid cloud and run Hadoop cluster nodes on-premise and on the Skytap Cloud. That way they can scale Hadoop clusters when large datasets need additional compute, memory, storage and network resources.

The hybrid Hadoop clusters can be managed as a single, unified cluster on-premise or from within the Skytap Cloud. Users should get increased speed and flexibility and avoid the cost of purchasing additional on-premise hardware to meet peak scaling needs.

Skytap is offering a base Cloudera CDH4 Hadoop multi-node cluster template plus an additional single-node template to add more nodes. It says the basic configuration is good for HDFS, MapReduce, Hue, Oozie and ZooKeeper.

Hadoop clusters within the Skytap Cloud benefit from Skytap's SmartClient, AutoNetworks, CloudControl and SmartShare technologies.

The hardware starts with a single processor and 1GB of memory and goes to eight processors and 32GB of memory. Two processors and 2GB of memory can also be had. The stuff runs on Ubuntu 12.0.4 and is already networked.

Skytap subscriptions can run $500 a month to $100,000 a month plus time on the system. The company says 10-50 nodes or 20-100 concurrent VMs should provide a "reasonable Hadoop system."