There’s been plenty of speculation over the last few months as to when and how Dell would make its Big Data play. Now we know.

As my colleague Alex Williams reported earlier today, Dell and Cloudera are partnering to deliver and end-to-end, purpose-built Hadoop cluster that combines Cloudera’s Distribution of Apache Hadoop with Dell’s PowerEdge C2100 servers, PowerConnect switches and Crowbar software.

The new product, officially called the Dell|Cloudera Hadoop Solution, will be available later this month and will be sold directly to customers by Dell. The two vendors have cross-trained support staff, so customers can go to either Dell or Cloudera for support services.

The partnership is a pretty natural fit for both vendors, as I see it.

Dell has significant experience supporting large, clustered computing environments via its Dell Custom Servers group. Among DCS’s customers is Facebook, which operates the largest Hadoop cluster – 30 petabytes – on the planet. Dell is also the leader in open, commodity hardware – a key component of Hadoop’s value proposition.

Cloudera’s Apache Hadoop distribution, meanwhile, is the most mature offering on the market. And it is an open distribution, meaning Cloudera customers are not locked in to a proprietary product.

The open approach by Cloudera and Dell is in stark contrast to the closed approach being taken by EMC. EMC earlier this year released a Hadoop-ready data warehouse appliance that bundles MapR’s proprietary Hadoop distribution with its Greenplum analytic database.

For Dell, the partnership and new offering is a low-risk entry point into the potentially very lucrative Big Data market. It has now associated itself with the leading Hadoop distribution, giving it a compelling product to offer its existing customers looking to get started with Big Data (See the below interviews with Cloudera engineers talking about CDH3.)

The partnership and combined offering is likely only Dell’s opening Big Data gambit, however. Dell has recently turned its focus away from being a master of the IT supply-chain (though it retains that title as well) to acquiring its own intellectual property (i.e. Dell’s acquisition of Compellent.) Dell may take a similar approach to Big Data and Hadoop. It may or may not end up being Cloudera, but I believe Dell will make an acquisition in the Big Data space sooner rather than later.