The Big Data whales are circling around each other at this week’s Strata conference. Three vendors announced new Hadoop flavors, and two major solution providers unveiled products that can help enterprises realize a return on their analytics software.

All about Hadoop

Greenplum introduced a new distribution called Pivotal HD, a near real time analytics engine that challenges with Cloudera’s Impala. Pivotal represents the EMC subsidiary’s fourth, and possibly most ambitious attempt to gain a substantial foothold in this market. We’ll see how the market reacts to the platform in the coming months.

Cloudera also announced a new product at Strata. The company that turned Hadoop into an enterprise IT phenomenon debuted the latest version of Cloudera Enterprise, its flagship big data management suite. The solution includes a revamped admin platform, new auditing capabilities that allow for improved governance, and a built-in backup and recovery system that saves organizations the trouble of finding a third party offerings.

The announcements from Greenplum and Cloudera didn’t surprise anyone, but the one from Intel did: the chipmaker jumped on the analytics bandwagon with a Hadoop distro of its own.

Intel wants to get involved in the big data market because companies that are implementing Hadoop need lots of hardware to support their initiative. If nothing else, the company’s involvement on the software side will give it a marketing advantage over competing suppliers.

Deployment

Intel is not the only hardware vendor that has been paying attention to the buzz surrounding analytics. Yesterday, DDN announced a storage appliance  that can deliver better throughput than commodity server clusters thanks to automatic resolution.

PaaS provider Continuity also made headlines at Strata this week. The company released a set of new developer tools, including a same-as-production testing environment for big data apps.