Skytap Inc. today announced the availability of pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) Enterprise templates in the Skytap Cloud public template library. With the release, Skytap's enterprise customers gain on-demand, self-service access to Cloudera's leading open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, including the Cloudera Enterprise free edition, which can be used to deploy and manage physical or virtual clusters of up to 50 nodes.

"Big data has such a vast size that it exceeds the capacity of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone," said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner in a report titled "'Big Data' Is Only The Beginning of Extreme Information Management." "The largest datasets will require the use of public or private cloud computing resources to achieve periodic and on-demand scaling."

With Skytap's enterprise-ready Cloudera Hadoop templates, customers can reportedly create virtual Hadoop cluster environments in less than ten minutes, without procuring in-house hardware. The Skytap templates allow users to create, spin-up, suspend, save, and tear down Hadoop clusters of various sizes as needed. The templates also eliminate the complexity and time required to manually download, install, configure, and network together all of the required software and hardware components.

Skytap Cloud's multi-VPN capability allows users to run Hadoop cluster nodes on-premise coupled with additional Hadoop cluster nodes that run in Skytap Cloud. The hybrid cloud Hadoop cluster can be managed as a single, unified cluster on-premise or from within Skytap Cloud for added flexibility.

The pre-installed, pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop templates in Skytap Cloud include cluster compute nodes and a management/server node featuring Cloudera Manager, a full-featured automation tool for CDH clusters. Skytap Cloud also offers a base Cloudera CDH4 Hadoop multi-node cluster template plus an additional single-node template that allows for the addition of more nodes to the base cluster. Using the Cloudera Manager Free edition, users can perform basic configuration and administration tasks for HDFS, MapReduce, Hue, Oozie and ZooKeeper.

Access to Skytap's SmartClient, AutoNetworks, CloudControl and SmartShare technologies are also included.

"Hadoop has forever changed the way enterprises manage big data. Skytap is transforming the way businesses deploy and benefit from big data solutions by introducing Cloudera Hadoop templates for enterprise hybrid clouds," said Brad Schick, vice president of engineering at Skytap. "By utilizing Cloudera Hadoop within Skytap Cloud, businesses can drive faster time to value by eliminating the need to procure in-house hardware and avoid the complexity and expertise required to download, install and configure all of the required components. For engineers, the environment is right there in Skytap Cloud and ready to go."