The vast majority of the general population is familiar with Google, Etsy, and Twitter. Yet most are unfamiliar with Hadoop, even though all of these popular big data social media and search engine platforms use Hadoop to manage the terabytes of data they store and exchange. Experts predict that, in the coming years, the term “Hadoop” could become as common as the phrase “big data”.
So what’s Hadoop, and why should businesses care? Data – and data collection – is exploding. It’s being gathered and processed on mobile devices and computers, RFID readers, and cameras at unprecedented rates.
Hadoop makes it easy for businesses to manage big data from a myriad of sources without constantly investing and reinvesting in new storage hardware. It’s capable of processing vast amounts of data and returning search and computational results quickly and efficiently. Because it’s an open-source framework, Hadoop is free to use. So it’s attractive to organizations looking to trim their IT budgets. In addition to a low price-point, Hadoop is an excellent processing environment for managing high calculation complexity like statistical simulations or extensive analytics – activities that are typically slow and resource-intensive.
Another perk making Hadoop popular in the era of big data is its flexibility, able to store structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data – as much as needed – without the need to preprocess that data beforehand as required with a traditional relational database. To safeguard business continuity, Hadoop also replicates data across multiple computers. So data and application processing are secure even in the event of hardware failure.
Companies looking to solve large-scale calculations, make sense of business intelligence, or manage massive amounts of data in multiple formats – from text to video and images – can do so within the Hadoop processing environment. Its value touches a wide range of industries – from analysts building sophisticated financial models to ecommerce storefronts that need to give customers quick catalog search results.
Interested in learning more about how Hadoop can help your organization? Contact American Digital to Learn More