Skytap Launches Pre-Configured Cloudera Hadoop into Hybrid Cloud

Written by Chris Talbot 1
January 16, 2013

Big Data continues to be a major trend within the cloud computing space, and now Skytap has launched a pre-configured version of Cloudera Hadoop into its own cloud platform so customers can quickly configure and launch Hadoop nodes.

Skytap, a provider of self-service cloud automation products, has unveiled pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) Enterprise templates that are now available as part of the Skytap Cloud public template library.

According to Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap, the launch of Cloudera Hadoop for Enterprise Hybrid Clouds will make it easier for Skytap Cloud customers to quickly and easily configure and launch Hadoop instances for development and testing purposes. Goodwin told Talkin’ Cloud that a customer can use the service to get virtual Hadoop clusters up and running in less than 10 minutes.

“It also includes their Cloudera Manager. The whole environment is a pre-loaded, pre-configured template. It’s available in what we call the Skytap Cloud public content library,” Goodwin said.

Available for free up to 50 nodes to Skytap Cloud customers, the Hadoop deployment primarily will be used for spinning up clusters to do development and testing rather than for creating production environments, Goodwin noted. That’s in line with the way Skytap customers typically use the cloud. Its top use case is software development and testing, followed by virtual technical training and software demonstrations and evaluations.

During a demonstration of the new service, Goodwin also showed that additional nodes can be added to an existing cluster in less than 60 seconds.

For customers that need more nodes beyond the 50 free ones being made available, they will have to purchase licenses from Cloudera.

Big Data continues to find its way into the cloud, and customers are looking for ways to manage it. Apache Hadoop has quickly become one of the leading software solutions for managing Big Data in the cloud, and Cloudera is one of—if not, the—top provider of Hadoop. Cloudera has partnered with other vendors in an effort to boost Hadoop adoption, and it also has continued to build out the features and capabilities in its own flavor of Hadoop.