The same cloud-computing technology used by Facebook, Google, Yahoo and other Web giants is poised to land in regular enterprise data centers, courtesy of a free software distribution from Silicon Valley startup Cloudera.
Inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System research papers, Hadoop is a cloud-computing technology for storing and processing petabytes of information on systems comprised of hundreds or even thousands of servers, said Cloudera CEO Mike Olson.
“Processing this kind of big data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for all but the most sophisticated IT organizations until now,” Olson said. “Cloudera is focused on bringing the power of the open-source community to the market at large” and making “big data-processing capabilities accessible and affordable for all companies.”
A One-Stop Shop
IDC predicts that worldwide IT spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold by 2012, when it is expected to total $42 billion and account for nine percent of revenues in five key market segments. More important, the research firm forecasts that spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, capturing 25 percent of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of the expected growth for the following year.
Though David Smith, Gartner’s vice president, thinks cloud computing still has a way to go before it reaches maturity, making Hadoop available to a wider range of companies is certainly “one of the important things that starts to unlock the potential of cloud computing.” However, Cloudera “is not the only company supporting Hadoop: HP is doing a lot of work with Hadoop, as is Yahoo” Smith observed.
What makes Cloudera different from HP and Yahoo is its goal of serving as a specialized one-stop shop for the free Java software framework that currently empowers the cloud.
“As we listen to the community,…