Best Hadoop Solution

For enterprises trying to get their arms around big data, there is one technology that stands out among all others – Hadoop.

The staggering variety of big data – with much of it unstructured, including business documents, presentations, emails, log files and social media data, means that this data does not fit neatly into the rows and columns of relational database management systems.  But Hadoop, which is an open source technology for storing and processing data that runs on industry-standard hardware, embraces this mixed bag of data types and enables companies to store and analyze data sets with no limits in size.

Originally created by Doug Cutting, a Yahoo! engineer at the time, the open source framework was famously named after his son’s toy elephant. Early adopters were social media and retail companies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, and Amazon. But today, with the explosion of big data, the interest in the technology has expanded well beyond that initial group.

In the years that have passed, with the expansion of the Hadoop ecosystem to include an expanded array of tools and services, key vendors have emerged that market their own distributions of Apache Hadoop, often adding a range of professional services and capabilities, or partnering with other vendors, to make the technology more robust, secure, and enterprise-hardened.

Here are the winners of the 2014 DBTA Readers' Choice Awards for Best Hadoop Solution:

Winner: Cloudera

Finalists:

Hortonworks

MapR