Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Elizabeth White, Maureen O'Gara, Wiqar Chaudry, Sebastian Kruk, Pat Romanski

Related Topics: Search, Open Source, Virtualization, Red Hat, Cloud Expo

Search: Article

Hadoop Start-up Attracts Glitterati Investors

Hadoop, by the way, is named for a stuffed elephant that belonged to Cutting's son

Cloudera, the start-up that going to commercialize Hadoop, the Google-inspired, Apache-fostered open source software that powers the data processing engines behind some of the biggest and most popular web sites - sites like Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and Google itself - even Microsoft - pulled in a $5 million first round led by Accel Partners.

Ah, but the private investors going in with Accel constitute a veritable cavalcade of industry glitterati that you practically have to put sunglasses on just to read the list.

It includes VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene and her husband, VMware's other co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, Microsoft's online chief and former Yahoo EVP Qi Lu, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, LinkedIn president Jeff Weiner, Loudcloud founder In Sik Rhee, Illustra CEO Dick Williams, Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, Palm SVP Mike Abbott and early Google employee David desJardins.

Goodness me, what validation!

The operation got started last October and just announced the general availability of its free Distribution for Hadoop, a pre-packaged RPM bundle for Red Hat Linux systems or an Amazon EC2 image licensed under an Apache 2 license.

The web site widgetry, written in Java, stores and processes big data, petabytes of information often distributed across thousands of servers, and Cloudera means to bring its data analysis skills to enterprise data center by making it easier to install, configure and manage, according to co-founder Christophe Bisciglia, the former manager of Google's Hadoop cluster.

Cloudera's other founders include CEO Mike Olsen, the guy who sold Sleepycat Software to Oracle, Amr Awadallah, Yahoo's former VP of engineering, and Jeff Hammerbacher, creator of the Hive project and conveniently enough entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners.

Hadoop's creators Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella, who reverse engineered the open source project from a Google research paper, are advisors.

Cloudera's distribution, based on the stable Hadoop 0.18.3, includes the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), which runs on commodity hardware and supports tens of millions of files in a single instance; the Google-conceived MapReduce, which divides applications into small blocks of work for automatic parallelization and execution on large clusters; Hive, the data warehousing infrastructure built on top of Hadoop; and Pig, the platform for analyzing large data sets in Hadoop using the high-level language for expressing data analysis programs called logically enough PigLatin.

Cloudera has launched a portal at http://my.cloudera.com where people can use a free web-based configuration tool to create custom packages. Settings for the clusters can be saved on the portal to enable automatic updates.

It's also got a free pre-configured VMware image available for evaluation and use in equally free online training (http://www.clodera.com/hadopp-training). It'll run on Linux, Mac or Windows desktops.

The company expects to make money on support and consulting. It plans on chasing biotechs, the oil and gas cartel, insurance companies and retail establishments.

Hadoop, by the way, is named for a stuffed elephant that belonged to Cutting's son.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
New, "Super-Sized" 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.
As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible. In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Ev...
“Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued. Cloud Computing Journal: The move ...
If zettabytes of data exist, why is less than 1% of the world’s data being analyzed today? Seasoned entrepreneur and startup CEO Radhika Subramanian believes that the inability to analyze and gain value from Big Data is that organizations are taking a services-centered approach. As the title of the session implies, Subramanian believes that the data needs to do the talking, not armies of analysts searching and querying databases. Her company has developed high-speed, advanced algorithms to autom...
Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how. In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMB...
Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time consuming effort that requires experts. In his upcoming session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Michael Kopp will be showing how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up Hadoop jobs at the core, without going through tons of log files, beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days.
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the crit...
At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure. This session will share industry best practices for deploying cloud infrastructure that maximize the benefits of cloud economics, agility and interoperability. Learn how...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...