Cloudera, provider of a popular distribution for Apache Hadoop, has certified a server cluster by Colfax, built around AMD processors, as fit to run its Hadoop distribution platform. AMD said the solution was up to 40% cheaper than similarly configured Intel-based ones.

The cluster consists of six 2U Colfax CX2270-N4 servers, each carrying two AMD Opteron 6200 series processors. The cluster has a total of 192 processor cores.

Amr Awadallah, Cloudera CTO and co-founder, said Cloudera certification for the cluster gave customers the best big-data bang for their buck. “AMD and Cloudera are both focused on providing our customers with cost-effective tools to process the vast amounts of data now available,” he said.

The cluster is designed for analysis of both structured and unstructured data.

Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework for building large-scale compute clusters out of low-cost commodity servers and using them to run massive compute workloads.

Past two weeks have been an eventful time for Hadoop.

On 5^th June, HP announced at its Discover event in Las Vegas massive support for Hadoop, launching a Hadoop-specific hardware architecture and integrating the latest release of its analytics platform Vertica with Hadoop. Earlier this week, Hortonworks, another major company with a distribution platform for Hadoop, has partnered with the storage vendor NetApp to develop joint solutions for Apache Hadoop deployments.