Dell to build in-memory Hadoop appliances with Cloudera and Intel

Dell, Cloudera and Intel are working together on an appliance designed to speed the performance of Hadoop environments by moving a lot more data into a shared memory space. Key to the performance improvement is Apache Spark, the in-memory data-processing framework that’s now included in Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. At this point, it seems like Hadoop vendors are going to sell their wares regardless where they run, so a deal like this really helps Dell make the case that hardware matters in big data environments. The companies claim it’s the first in a family of “Dell Engineered Systems for Cloudera Enterprise.”