MapR, the startup that developed the M3 and M5 Hadoop distributions competing with Cloudera’s dominant distribution as well as the several other players currently hitting the market, has secured $20 million in venture capital. The funding round was led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates.

“MapR is clearly the technology leader in the hottest enterprise market space today and our investment reflects our excitement about MapR,” said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. “The advantages provided by the MapR distribution expand the number of companies that can gather, understand and benefit from big data.”

There has been some buzz around MapR ever since its launched, and this VC backing confirms that the company has its loyal followers.  The main reason enterprises, whether companies or partners such as EMC (which based its Enterprise Edition Hadoop almost entirley on M5) are looking at MapR is performance. The company claims its distributions typically run two to five times faster than Hadoop distros, and M5, the paid enterprise version of its offering, provides increased reliability and performance. MapR also offers bundled in data protection and recovery.

The Hadoop ecosystem is growing, and as a consequence we’re seeing a sharp rise in activity from the rest of the open-source movement.  Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made plans to acquire a Hadoop or NoSQL company in the near future public a few days ago. This means it can take an indirect approach to compete on the same turf Oracle is now gunning for.

This news came shortly after an earlier update from Gluster. The open-source storage solutions maker announced GlusterFS 3.3 beta 2, the latest version of its software only storage platform that comes with Hadoop support coupled with several added in advantages.