Nimbula has paired with MapR Technologies on a turnkey solution for deploying a Hadoop cluster on a Nimbula Director-based cloud. The platform combines Nimbula Director, a private-cloud platform that allows IT pros to transform bare-metal servers with local disks into multi-tenant compute tools, with MapR’s Hadoop distribution. It comes with templates, recipes and verification tests. Nimbula claims that the platform will allow companies to benefit from two emerging trends: Hadoop, which has rapidly become a go-to framework for organizations needing to process large amounts of data, and private clouds, which offer scalability and flexible data delivery. On a more tactical level, its claims include Hadoop cluster deployment in less than two minutes, the ability to launch those clusters into the cloud without the need to requisition hardware, and sharing infrastructure between Hadoop and non-Hadoop workloads. Nimbula has made Nimbula Director free for deployment of up to 40 cores. A number of analyst firms predict the use of Hadoop and MapReduce, the latter another framework for processing problems across huge datasets and clusters of machines, will only grow over the next few years. Market Research Media recently predicted that Hadoop-MapReduce could become a $2.2 billion market by 2018, driven in large part by rapidly proliferating corporate data. Research firm IDC, on the other hand, believes that the worldwide revenues for Hadoop-MapReduce will rise to $812.8 million by 2016. That’s a significant jump from 2011, when revenues approached $77 million. Analyst firms generally cite the tension between proprietary and open-source platforms as another driver of Hadoop adoption. Market Research Media believes that “cost-prohibitive pricing models” of commercial software platforms will drive organizations to open-source Hadoop as a way to crunch data; IDC also believes that the competition between proprietary and open-source will eventually force commercial software vendors to lower product-licensing fees, which could depress overall revenues. “The Hadoop and MapReduce market will likely develop along the lines established by the development of the Linux ecosystem,” Dan Vesset, vice president of Business Analytics Solutions for IDC, wrote in a May statement. “Over the next decade, much of the revenue will be accrued by hardware, applications, and application development and deployment software vendors.”   Image: Centurion Studio/Shutterstock.com