Big data firm Zettaset and Hyve Solutions, a company that makes custom servers with a focus on data driven-workloads, announced they’ve started working on a new Hadoop appliance.

The collaboration between the two firms will produce a solution comprised of Hyve-developed boxes running the Zettaset Orchestrator management platform on  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2. Hyve will be the exclusive distributor.

“Businesses and organizations that want to adopt Hadoop as an enterprise-grade solution which manages the demands of extremely large amounts of data need to run it on enterprise hardware with an enterprise operating system,” said Roger Egan, vice president, North America Channel Sales & Development at Red Hat.

“Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system offers a robust platform for Zettaset to leverage in combination with its Orchestrator solution to help simplify big data management for enterprises.”

Enterprise Linux 6.2 is the de facto commercial Linux distro for the enterprise. More importantly though, Hyve claims an advantage because it’s in the business of optimizing hardware, and, SYNNEX, its parent company, having contributed a great deal to the OS via the Open Source Channel Alliance.

Zettaset’s Orchestrator in turn is an open source tool designed to make Hadoop management a bit more efficient with self-healing and similar features that help automate certain tasks. The software developer has a rather interesting take on the big data ecosystem, something that CEO Jim Vogt discussed thoroughly in a recent interview with SiliconANGLE.

According to Vogt, what differentiates Zettaset from others is that it doesn’t rewrite Hadoop itself, but instead offers an add-on that works as an addition layer between the user and the big data core (in addition to added security, as of this update).  Partnerships with hardware providers are a key element of the company’s strategy.