Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop company, has announced that the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop now supports running Hadoop on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) clusters with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) backed storage. Typically, Hadoop clusters on Amazon EC2 use local disks or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). The Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop directly integrates the Hadoop File System with Amazon EBS.

When not in use, the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop allows a cluster to surrender unneeded EC2 instances, then restart later, carrying on where it left off. Users no longer need to copy large volumes of data from S3 to local disk on the EC2 instance -- data persists reliably and independently in Amazon's EBS, saving compute costs.

"This announcement marks a major advancement in the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop, as EBS support brings significant cost savings in storage versus S3," said Christophe Bisciglia, Founder at Cloudera. "The Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop leverages both EC2 and EBS to directly align computation costs with usage, lower overall storage costs, and improve performance."

Cloudera's EBS support removes the requirement to move data in and out of S3 for each job. Additionally, it improves performance by enabling more disks per node compared to EC2, which provides a fixed number of local disks per instance. EBS support allows the Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop to perform better than local EC2 storage or Amazon's premium priced, S3 based, Elastic MapReduce.