We get asked a lot of questions about how to select Apache Hadoop worker node hardware. During my time at Yahoo!, we bought a lot of nodes with 6*2TB SATA drives, 24GB RAM and 8 cores in a dual socket configuration. This has proven to be a pretty good configuration. This year, I’ve seen systems with 12*2TB SATA drives, 48GB RAM and 8 cores in a dual socket configurations. We will see a move to 3TB drives th ...

Services is going to play a huge role in the ultimate success (or failure) of wide-spread adoption of Hadoop and related Big Data technologies by “mainstream” enterprises. The question is: Will Big Data services be delivered by commercial Hadoop vendors like Cloudera and Hortonworks as part of their value-add to the open source framework, or will a separate market of third-party services providers and consu ...

Big data is getting bigger, and Hadoop is becoming the tool that will allow companies to make full use of their growing amounts of data, says Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capita. Fenton is a partner at the venture capital firm which owns the majority stake of HortonWorks, a startup that separated from Yahoo’s Hadoop dev team, and is offering services around the open-source big data analytics platform. In an in ...