Cloudera today announced Cloudera Enterprise with Cloudera Manager 3.7, the latest version of the company’s proprietary Apache Hadoop management stack. Most notably the launch includes a new Cloudera Manager Free Edition, which is available as a free download here. The Free Edition is only free as in beer, however – Cloudera Manager has not been open sourced. The new free product replaces SCM Express.

HortonWorks, the Hadoop-focused startup spun-out of Yahoo and one of Cloudera’s newest rivals, offers its management tools for free. “The overriding question, which has yet to be answered, is how many proprietary, value-add components are the Hadoop community/user-base willing to accept from distribution vendors like EMC/MapR and, to a lesser extent, Cloudera?” Wikibon data analyst Jeffrey Kelly wrote earlier this week. “Hortonworks is betting none.” Instead, HortonWorks is open sourcing all its software and betting on a pure services play.

In response to Cloudera’s announcement Kelly told me it sounds like a reaction to criticism Cloudera has faced for taking the proprietary route, unlike HortonWorks. “The question is, is it really useful or just a PR move by Cloudera,” Kelly says. We agree that it’s too early to be sure. But the Free Edition will support up to 50 nodes, which is a pretty reasonable number for a starter product.

The paid version Cloudera Enterprise includes both the management software and Hadoop support. According to Cloudera’s announcement, new features include:

• Intelligent Hadoop Log Management: Gathers and scans Hadoop logs for irregularities and proactively create events for the operator.
• Global Time Control: Correlates cluster-wide jobs, activities, logs, system changes, configuration
  changes and service metrics along a single timeline to dramatically simplify diagnosis.
• Alerts: Alerts on nodes or services in poor health, as well as jobs or activities that are slow orfailing; integrates with the central company alerting system.
• Support Integration: Takes a snapshot of the cluster state and automatically sends it to a
  Cloudera support professional to assist with diagnosis and resolution.

Cloudera needs to prove to the market that it can successfully transition its existing customers from small Proof-of-Concept Hadoop deployments to full-fledged production-level deployments supporting hundreds of nodes, large volumes of concurrent users, and petabytes of data,” Kelly said. “The new management features included in Cloudera Enterprise 3.7 are a good step in that direction, but the real test will come over the coming months as Cloudera puts them into action.”

Here’s Cloudera CTO Amr Awadallah on theCube talking why the company uses proprietary tools and making the case that users don’t have to worry about vendor lock-in: