It’s been an action-packed week for the open-source cloud, and especially for Hadoop-based products.  Yahoo launched a heavily speculated spin-off of its Hadoop project called Hortonworks, while Ravel pushed out its own open source project called GoldenOrb.  Now Cloudera, one of the most notable Hadoop management services is updating its Enterprise suite with new software that further simplifies Hadoop across its entire operational lifecycle.

Cloudera’s Enterprise 3.5 is highly automated for setup, configuration and monitoring, with one-click security for Hadoop clusters.  The subscription service comes with production support for Apache Hadoop, and the entire Hadoop ecosystem.  It’s an important step for Cloudera to expand its support mechanisms around Hadoop as more enterprise sectors incorporate an increasing amount of Hadoop’s products into their infrastructure.  Simplifying the use of this open-source data management tool is a necessity growing right along side enterprise demand.

“We have seen extensive adoption of Apache Hadoop across our client base, but the management challenges of running the Hadoop stack in production can be prohibitive,” said Matt Dailey, Hadoop applications developer for the High Performance Computing Center at SRA International, Inc. “This latest release of Cloudera’s Management Suite goes a long way to giving enterprises the confidence to operate a Hadoop system in production.”

Some of the important features to note center around the deployment and management of a range of Hadoop services, providing the power needed to efficiently manage multi-node clusters in a shorter amount of time.  The new features include real-time montioring of Hadoop systems, consolidating all user activities, from MapReduce to Hive. One major perk for the new Activity Monitor is the built-in historical view of Hadoop jobs, giving admin the ability to compare current and previous activities.  This gives administrators a great deal more insight to their Hadoop environments, so they can better understand what programs are running, their speed and the overall health of the system.

What Cloudera is really doing is extending many of the services you’d typically find from an integrated enterprise solution to encompass its Hadoop services.  When Cloudera first launched its Hadoop management tools, its clients were mostly web customers.  Over the years, Cloudera’s client base has become disproportionately full of Fortune 500 companies, from banks to retailers, the federal government and telecom companies. This reflects the growing demand around Hadoop’s data processing capabilities, but also demonstrate’s Cloudera’s ability to facilitate an open source product for the enterprise environment.  Maintaining a high level of integration with existing cloud systems has always been integral in Cloudera’s support system, and its Enterprise 3.5 suite is considerate of its clients’ business needs.

But Cloudera is also looking to go mainstream, with hopes to attract a broader array of companies that also need its data management solutions.  That goes beyond the banking and media industries to include oil and gas companies, consumer goods and business services.  “They all have data management problems too, but they don’t already have the resources to deploy Hadoop on their own,” says Hadoop’s Charles Zedlewski.

To encourage new clients, Cloudera’s also offering a portion of its platform for free.  SCM Express will let you try Cloudera before purchasing the full service, setting up an integrated Apache Hadoop stack in minutes.  With it you can develop and centrally operate a complete cluster supporting up to 50 nodes.  Installation and configuration are automated, giving you a taste of how Cloudera works from an integration standpoint, while also offering real-time views of nodes and services from a single interface.

“Cloudera helps enterprises plan for the inevitable changes; we help you get started, then operate and grow or sunset pieces of the cluster over time,” says Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. “This is a long-term platform, and with the release of Cloudera Enterprise 3.5, we are not only introducing new levels of transparency and automation, but we’re injecting best practices Cloudera has learned over many years of helping enterprise customers build and manage Apache Hadoop-based systems.”

Below is an interview with Olsen at theCube, where he discusses Cloudera’s ecosystem, history and business model.  See here for additional analysis on Cloudera’s latest coup.