Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloudera, EC2, and BI

by Curt Hall

Recent developments have brought together parallel processing and cloud computing technologies in such a way that they are set to change the way organizations look at analyzing massive amounts of data. In fact, I believe that these developments hold the promise of ushering in a new era in high-end, affordable data analysis. And the cool thing about it is that this era isn't a few years "down the road"; it's here, now. I'm referring to the commercialization of the open source Hadoop and MapReduce distributed processing framework, Amazon's cloud-based version of these tools -- now available on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform for anyone to rent -- and the rise of new startups, such as Cloudera, to help businesses apply these tools to data mining and other enterprise BI applications.