Cloudera continued its aggressive efforts to expand its distribution channels by announcing a partnership with NetApp, the storage and data management vendor, on Monday. The partnership revealed the release of the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, a preconfigured Hadoop cluster that combines Cloudera's Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Enterprise with NetApp's RAID architecture. NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop is intended to grant enterprises seeking to implement Hadoop enhanced ease of deployment, improved scalability, superior performance and reduced costs. Part of the reduced enterprise costs enabled by the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop derives from NetApp's state of the art backup and replication capabilities that minimize downtime in the event of disk failure.
Speaking of the NetApp Open Solution, Rich Clifton, senior vice president and general manager, NetApp Technology Enablement and Solutions Organization, remarked:
Customers are looking for business advantages from the wealth of their unstructured data. Today, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop will help customers get answers fast and process more, as well as provide the reliability and performance that our customers have come to expect from NetApp.
GigaOm reports that one of the key attributes of the NetApp Open Solution is its separation of the compute and storage layers of a Cloudera Hadoop installation. Separating the compute and storage layers enables enhanced performance, scalability and reduced downtime in the event of the failure of a disk within either the compute or storage layer. Cloudera's partnership with NetApp comes roughly three weeks after its announcement of a reseller deal with SGI, whereby SGI will distribute Cloudera's Apache Hadoop (CDH) alongside its rackable servers and provide level 1 technical support, while Cloudera will provide level 2 and level 3 technical support. Both deals seek to consolidate Cloudera's market share within the Hadoop distribution space in relation to competitors such as MapR, its partner EMC and Yahoo-spinoff Hortonworks.
In conjunction with the deal with NetApps, Cloudera announced that it had successfully completed a Series D fund raising worth $40 million, led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners with the support of existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. The latest funding round takes the total of Cloudera's financing to $76 million and supports Cloudera's explosive growth in the Big Data space with particular emphasis on marketing, sales operations and strategic business development. Cloudera brands itself as the first company to deliver enterprise grade deployments of Apache Hadoop, the disruptive technology framework for analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. Apache Hadoop is used by enterprises such as eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, eHarmony and Twitter to make strategic business decisions on the basis of large-scale structured and unstructured data sets. Cloudera's announcement of its Series D funding and partnership with NetApp came on the eve of Hadoop World 2011, the world's largest conference of Hadoop practitioners.