Infochimps is a big data firm that is known for its analytics platform, as well as the data set and API market it operates.  The company is also behind a number of open-source innovations such as the Ironfan configuration tool, one that is a very important element of VMware’s new Serengeti project.

Serengeti is an open solution that is the product of an alliance between the virtualization giant, Infochimps, Cloudera, Hortonworks and a couple of other major players in the big data space. It debuted earlier this week at the Hadoop Summit, touted as a virtualization aware deployment tool for the popular analytics engine.  Enterprises that want to run their big data processing in the cloud, especially if it’s powered by VMware’s software, now have an easier time setting things up.

Ironfan is one of the most important components of Serengeti, as well as Infochimps’ flagship offering. The company posted a note on its blog to spread word of the development:

“The Serengeti project supports our open source tradition with its strong open source foundation and support by all of the major Hadoop distributions. Within the Serengeti project, Ironfan enables users to quickly and easily configure and deploy Hadoop clusters on top of VMware vSphere in minutes with a single command. Now, users running VMware’s virtual and cloud infrastructure can more easily take advantage of the power of Hadoop as well as other Big Data technologies like the Infochimps Data Delivery Service, Dashpot, and Infochimps big data expertise…”

Dashpot is the newest addition to the list. The tool was launched back in April and sits on top of the Infochimps Platform, visualizing the data that goes through the system and aggregating it in one place. It also extends the platform with a number of backend improvements.