Cloudera has seen some pretty amazing growth for a year-old startup. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, Cloudera commercially distributes and services Hadoop. It’s similar in theory to Red Hat’s distribution of Linux. At tomorrow’s Hadoop World: NYC, Cloudera is announcing “Cloudera Desktop” a unified graphical user interface for Hadoop applications that includes tools for job and cluster management. This is significant because Cloudera is transitioning from providing a service to distributing an actual software.

Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology. Cloudera’s newest Desktop software lets developers, analysts and administrators submit jobs, to monitor cluster health and to browse the data stored on a Hadoop cluster. Basically, helps business teams manage and monitor applications that store data using Hadoop.

Cloudera Desktop runs inside a Web browser, and works on Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems. Applications within Desktop include a file browser, for copying and browsing the data files stored on a cluster; a job designer, for creating, running and saving jobs for later reuse or customization; the job browser, for keeping track of job status and progress; and a cluster health dashboard, for monitoring the health of a Hadoop cluster and alerting operators in case of problems.

Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including, Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. To date, Cloudera has raised $11 million in funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

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