Hadoop sometimes results in strange bedfellows.

Oracle announced today that it has forged a partnership with commercial Hadoop distribution vendor Cloudera. Cloudera’s Apache compatible Hadoop distribution, CDH, and its proprietary Hadoop management software, Cloudera Manager, will be included in Oracle’s Big Data Appliance.

(Click here for my in-depth analysis of today’s announcement on the Wikibon blog.)

The appliance, which was originally announced at Oracle Open World in October, is generally available as of today. A preconfigured bundle of Cloudera software and Oracle/Sun hardware, the appliance is designed to plug-and-play, removing the often long configuration time associated with Hadoop, said Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn. “There is no other system like it on the market today,” he added.

In addition to CDH and Cloudera Manager, the Oracle Big Data Appliance also includes:

• Oracle Linux operating system;
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition;
• Open source R distribution;
• Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual machine.

It is available as a full rack 18-node cluster, according to Cetin Ozbutun, Oracle Vice President of Data Warehousing Technologies. Oracle will not offer half or quarter rack distributions, he said.

“Oracle Big Data Appliance, in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, Oracle Exalytics and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, offers the broadest, most integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organize diverse data types, and then analyze them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions,” Ozbutun said in a statement.

Oracle also announced the availability of Oracle Loader for Hadoop, which, as the name suggests, aims to streamline the process of loading data from Hadoop into Oracle 11g.

In addition, the company released Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, a GUI-style tool for generating MapReduce jobs; Oracle Connector R, which facilitates working with HDFS using the open source language in Oracle environments; and Oracle Direct Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System that enables direct data access between the Oracle Database SQL engine and HDFS.

ServicesAngle

Ozbutun said Oracle customers are increasingly concerned with Big Data workloads that include a blend of structured, semis-structured and unstructured data. The Big Data Appliance and related services will make it easier to integrate different types of data into a single Oracle environment for analysis. Oracle is responsible for maintenance and support, Ozbutun said.

Perhaps the partnership should not come as that much of a surprise. After all, Cloudera CEO worked at Oracle as Vice President of Embedded Technologies for two years before joining Cloudera.

Much more analysis from Wikibon here.