Big data: 5 major advantages of Hadoop

Hadoop | Tech and Tools   |   
Published December 21, 2013   |   
Michele Nemschoff

By now, you have probably heard of Apache Hadoop – the name is derived from a cute toy elephant but Hadoop is all but a soft toy. Hadoop is an open source project that offers a new way to store and process big data. The software framework is written in Java for distributed storage and distributed processing of very large data sets on computer clusters built from commodity hardware. (source)

While large Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook use Hadoop to store and manage their huge data sets, Hadoop has also proven valuable for many other more traditional enterprises based on its five big advantages.

1. Scalable

Hadoop is a highly scalable storage platform, because it can store and distribute very large data sets across hundreds of inexpensive servers that operate in parallel. Unlike traditional relational database systems (RDBMS) that can’t scale to process large amounts of data, Hadoop enables businesses to run applications on thousands of nodes involving thousands of terabytes of data.

2. Cost effective

Hadoop also offers a cost effective storage solution for businesses’ exploding data sets. The problem with traditional relational database management systems is that it is extremely cost prohibitive to scale to such a degree in order to process such massive volumes of data. In an effort to reduce costs, many companies in the past would have had to down-sample data and classify it based on certain assumptions as to which data was the most valuable. The raw data would be deleted, as it would be too cost-prohibitive to keep. While this approach may have worked in the short term, this meant that when business priorities changed, the complete raw data set was not available, as it was too expensive to store. Hadoop, on the other hand, is designed as a scale-out architecture that can affordably store all of a company’s data for later use. The cost savings are staggering: instead of costing thousands to tens of thousands of pounds per terabyte, Hadoop offers computing and storage capabilities for hundreds of pounds per terabyte.

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