The complexity often cited as one of the main factors behind the slow adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise encompasses not only the difficulty of putting the analytics framework to use but also the challenges involved in setting up the supporting infrastructure below. That’s what BlueData Inc. hopes to address with the help of $20 million in new funding announced this morning.

The capital will go into its EPIC virtualization platform, which attempts to tackle the inefficiency of physically provisioning data crunching clusters. It’s the very same problem that had earlier led the enterprises now implementing Hadoop to adopt hypervisors such as VMware Inc.’s for their more conventional applications, but at a much greater scale.

Configuring a fleet of bare-metal servers to perform something as complicated as scanning vast amounts of unstructured data for insights can take months of effort, which is to be expected in any large enterprise technology project. The difficulty is that operational needs evolve and change over time, meaning the process has to be repeated every time a business analyst wants to adopt some major new capability.

The introduction of YARN in the last major release of Hadoop has simplified that issue somewhat, making it possible to run multiple different analytic services same deployment instead of having to set up a separate cluster for each, but the underlying servers still have to be configured. As a result, organizations have been struggling to keep with the rapid changes in the upstream project.

EPIC promises to do away with that logistical obstacle, enabling end-users to provision their own virtual clusters in a matter of minutes rather than waitings month for a team of administrators to do it for them. The platform providers a choice among the top three distributions as well as a selection of popular analytics tools for Hadoop, which be deployed with only a few extra clicks.

Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData, explained in detail how EPIC works when he appeared on theCUBE at the #BigDataNYC event in New York last year:

EPIC effectively kills two birds with one stone, not only reducing the complexity of the framework and thus lowering the entry barrier but also reducing the net amount of time required to realize a return on investment, cutting implementing costs in the process. Those savings are joined by the resources organizations can free up through EPIC’s ability to make use of existing storage systems.

The new finding, which was led by Intel Capital and includes contributions from existing investors as well, will help expand upon that value proposition in more ways than one. BlueData has struck a strategic partnership with the chip maker as part of the investment that will see EPIC optimized for its processors and, most importantly, promoted through the latter’s global channel.

Having the sales muscle of the world’s largest CPU maker behind its back is a historic victory for an emerging startup such as BlueData that should provide a noticeable boost to adoption. But given that Intel has previously invested $720 million into Hadoop distributor Cloudera Inc., that may come at the expense of the rivaling distros that EPIC currently supports.

Photo via BlueData