Intel has become the largest shareholder in open source Hadoop distribution vendor Cloudera, making a “significant equity investment” in the company.

The chipmaker said this was the single largest data center technology investment in its history. The plan is to join Cloudera's Hadoop-based data management software with Intel's Xeon processor technology.

Cloudera will optimize its software for Intel architecture, making it a “preferred platform,” according to a statement the companies issued Thursday. The software will support Intel fabrics, flash memory and security.

Intel will market and promote CDH (the name of Cloudera's Hadoop distro) and Cloudera Enterprise (the enterprise-hardened flavor of software) to its customers as its “preferred Hadoop platform.”

Intel has its own Hadoop distribution, but optimizations it has made will now be integrated into CDH. Intel's distribution will be “transitioned,” and the two companies are working on a plan to ensure a smooth migration path for Intel's existing Hadoop customers onto Cloudera's distro.

Diane Bryant, senior VP and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, said alignment of the two companies' roadmaps would create a platform of choice for big data analytics.

“We expect to accelerate industry adoption of the Hadoop data platform and enable companies to mine their data for insights that inform the business,” she said. “This collaboration spans our data center technology from compute to network, security and storage, and extends to our initiatives for the Internet of Things.”

Cloudera promised to contribute all enhancements that result from the technological alignment to relevant open source projects.