Cloudera and Dell are announcing today an end-to-end, open-source Hadoop cluster. The offering integrates Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution with Dell’s servers.

Is there anything hotter than Hadoop? Yahoo spun out its Hadoop group to form HortonWorks earlier this summer. In the spring, EMC announced how it is fitting Hadoop with Greenplum, its data warehouse product.

With this news, Dell is again showing that its strategy is to offer configured, open-source stacks. As The Register points out, Dell has a similar offering for Ubuntu and one for OpenStack, too.

The move will help Cloudera compete  better against the likes of IBM, which has its own Hadoop service in Infosphere Big Insight. Map R is another competitor n the space.

Dell’s Crowbar software is a key component of the Cloud, Dell, Hadoop (CDH) cluster. Crowbar manages the Hadoop deployment form the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary Hadoop components. This allows for bare-metal deployments that the companies say takes hours instead of days.

This may be the big selling point for CDH. Integrating a Hadoop cluster is no easy task and the talent is limited. Cloudera, in fact, is investing heavily in education and certification. The problem is there are any number of settings that the customer must know in order to get the most out of the technology.

Services Angle

This is a smart play for Dell and Cloudera.  It gives Dell the leading Hadoop distribution and Cloudera association with a well-known brand with established channels.  It’s a services play, too, as education and configuration assistance are pretty much required for any customer integrating Hadoop into its environment.