HP and Cloudera are preparing to launch pre-integrated hardware clusters loaded with Apache Hadoop, the popular open-source cluster-computing platform that turns many commodity servers into one powerful computing environment.

Palo Alto, California-based Cloudera offers one of the most popular Hadoop distributions for enterprises.

Tim Stevens, VP of business and corporate development at Cloudera, said the agreement between the two companies was primarily about simplifying big-data processing and analytics on Hadoop.

“With HP reselling the Cloudera Enterprise platform, together we provide end users with a comprehensive big data analytics solution for data integration, analysis and visualization, built natively on open source Apache Hadoop,” he said.

The pre-integrated hardware-software solution – called HP AppSystem for Apache Hadoop-Cloudera – is part of the partnership the two companies announced Thursday. Under the agreement, HP will also provide reference architecture for building compute clusters for Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution, based on open standards.

AppSystem for Hadoop consists of an 18-node cluster of HP’s latest ProLiant Gen8 DL380 servers and HP networking gear, all managed through the HP Insight Cluster Management software.

The reference architecture is available now, while the AppSystem is expected to be on the market in late 2012, HP said.

The solutions include HP’s Cluster Manager Utility Software.

HP announced major support for Hadoop at its Discover conference in Las Vegas in June. At the event, the company announced the AppSystem architecture for Hadoop and added consulting services for customers that want to implement the open-source platform.

The latest release of HP-owned data-analytics platform Vertica will also integrate with Hadoop, the company said in June.