VentureBeat and OStatic are among the news source reporting the launch of Cloudera a new vendor set up to provide support for Apache Hadoop and related projects.

Given the current economic outlook it’s great to see a new open source start-up rearing its head, and the list of founders indicates that this one has a good chance of survival. While VentureBeat is focused on the fact that Ex-Google, Yahoo, and Facebook employees are on the team, my eye was caught by the fact that Mike Oslon, Sleepycat Software founder and former CEO has been tempted out of semi-retirement.

The full list of founders is as follows:

Michael Olson was formerly CEO of Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB, the open source embedded database engine. Mike spent two years at Oracle Corporation as Vice President for Embedded Technologies after Oracle’s acquisition of Sleepycat in 2006.

Dr. Amr Awadallah co-founded VivaSmart (aka Aptivia) in June of 1999. Yahoo! acquired VivaSmart in June 2000, and uses the VivaSmart technology as the core of the Yahoo! shopping service. Amr served as Vice President of Engineering for a business intelligence and analysis team responsible for improving the Yahoo! search user experience and better monetizing the search site.

Christophe Bisciglia joins Cloudera from Google, where he created and managed their Academic Cloud Computing Initiative.

Jeff Hammerbacher was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook.

According to a post on Amr Awadallah’s blog the company is busy hiring its engineering team and securing funding (presumably those links with Accel will come in handy).

As for the business model, details are thin on the ground at this stage, but the website notes that “Cloudera can help you install, configure and run Hadoop for large-scale data processing and analysis. We support Hadoop whether you run it on servers in your own data center or use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.”