Big news in the world of big data today: Dell and Cloudera made a joint announcement this morning that they’ll be partnering up to create an all-in-one solution for the deployment and support of Apache Hadoop for enterprise environments.

We covered this earlier today on ServicesAngle. Here’s my take on it.

This is Big News for Cloudera and Dell

The news of this has been kept uncharacteristically mum; in my briefing with Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn and Dell Cloud Marketing Director Joseph George, I didn’t have much of a hint going into the meeting what the topic of conversation would be (and usually SiliconANGLE tends to hear at least whispers of the news in advent of announcements, at least).

“This partnership goes beyond a “we like each other” thing,” said Dell’s George. “This is the first end to end solution for enterprises for Hadoop.”

George went on to explain in detail what motivated them to make this move.

“Cloudera services a significant portion of the Fortune 100 and most of them wanted solutions that streamlined deployment for Apache Hadoop,” said George. “What this announcement trumpets is the work with Cloudera we’ve done to create a “bulletproof” package. On the hardware side, it incorporates the Dell Poweredge 2800, and the Dell PowerConnect 6248 switch, as well as Cloudera Hadoop and Cloudera Enterprise on the software side.”

More than just a partnership and a server and software combo package, Cloudera worked together with Dell to create something that the cloud group at Dell could put into their channel marketing line-up.

“On the customer service side,” Cloudera’s Dunn explained, “Dell acts as the single point of contact, with the ability to take orders as well as sell training through the Cloudera University program. Essentially, a customer can call a Dell representative and get everything from end to end as a Dell and Cloudera certified solution and expect streamlined deployment.”

A Serious Validation Point

Still, the surprise at the announcement isn’t the only reason this news is impactful: Cloudera partnering with Dell for a certified solution gives Hadoop as a big data technology serious validation outside Silicon Valley and the world of Web 2.0 big data.

Dell’s data center solutions team has a strong history with custom build-outs in some of the world’s biggest scaled out environments (like Microsoft’s Azure or Facebook’s datacenter). The specifications from Fortune 100 companies they were seeing were common to these Web 2.0 examples, which in many cases rely heavily on Hadoop. Our PoweredgeC line worked in these hyper-scaled environments.

Part of what helped Dell make this realization is a software solution they announced named “Crowbar,” which is a Dell-developed software framework. Customers were reporting that it was frequently taking days and weeks to deploy Hadoop, which isn’t necessarily acceptable. and our goal with this partnership would be to get things down to a one day deployment (from “bare metal to a functioning environment,” as Joseph put it).

We first saw Crowbar when it debuted at SxSW this year, where they demonstrated the ability to rapidly deploy and maintain open source (and OpenStack) storage and compute platforms. In demonstrations in Austin earlier this year, they were able to make good on marketing commitments to deploy in under an hour, deploying three nodes in a demonstration at Kung Fu Saloon in about thirty minutes.

I asked how the company sees the Cloudera partnership in context to their channel marketing expansion, and Dell responded that they see Hadoop as a major growth area for the company, and a driver of hardware sales. The existing demand for easier Hadoop deployment came from clients in the federal, Web 2.0 and retail sectors, but they expect new demand to come from financial, telecommunications and entertainment sectors now that Hadoop deployment can be seen as less of a “science experiment” in the eyes of enterprise IT.

And that’s the real story: Dell truly is on the front lines of this one. At SiliconANGLE, it’s no secret we’re a fan of Hadoop in general, and very closely watch the progress of big data pioneers at Cloudera. This bit of news shows that Dell, a company with a track record providing of easily deployable bleeding edge technologies is promising to continue to push the envelope for their customers.