Hadoop Summit 2011 was held this week, and featured some pretty major developments, including what analyst Alex Williams dubbed Yahoo’s smartest play in years.

Yahoo’s Hadoop division separated from the company to form a new startup, Hortonworks, backed by Benchmark Capital. Hortonworks will be offering Hadoop-related services such as developer training and certification. On the flip side of the coin, Cloudera is also stepping up a notch with the announcement of Enterprise 3.5, the latest version of its Hadoop management offering. Some of the new features include real-time monitoring and a new Hadoop jobs history viewer.

Hadoop Summit 2011 represented a major event for other companies, too. For one, MapR Technologies unveiled two new distributions of the open-source big data analytics software:

“On Wednesday, amidst Yahoo!’s annual Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, California, MapR announced a free offering known as the Map3 M3 Edition and a for-pay version known as MapR M5.”

These two distributions do come with a catch, and are not completely open-source due to some extensive proprietary enhancements MapR added to the underlying platform. M3  is free, and M5 can be licensed for $4,000 per node per year.

Karmasphere and Think Big Analytics also had big news from the conference – the two companies partnered up to offer joint Hadoop solutions. Karmsphere offers the Karmasphere Analyst analytics virtual workspace and the Studio Professional Edition, MapReduce development environment, while Think Big Data offers services to  companies that maintain Hadoop deployments.

Over in the hardware angle, SeaMicro had a big win. The company offers the SM10000-64 micro server, a miniature database that consists of 256 Intel dual-core, 64-bit Atom N570 in a 10U chassis. Dating site eHarmony that used to run its matching algorithms on a service provider’s cloud will now be doing the same in its own datacenters using Hadoop, and SeaMicro’s technology.