Cloudera and Dell today announced an agreement to sell a complete Apache Hadoop solution. The package will include Dell hardware (including Dell PowerEdge C2100 servers and PowerConnect switches), Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera Enterprise and of course support. It should be available for purchase within the next 30 days. Details can be found on dell.cloudera.com.

It would be easy to see this as a reaction to EMC’s Hadoop appliance, which uses MapR‘s version of Hadoop. But the Cloudera and Dell teams are quick to distance themselves from the comparison.
“Customers don’t love the word appliance, this gives customers more flexibility,” Ed Albanese, head of business development at Cloudera, said. He says that although “turnkey” can mean a lot of things, he wants to emphasize that this is not a restrictive or prescriptive approach. Customers will have a lot of flexibiilty to customize the base package.
Disclosure: EMC owns VMware, which is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.