Hadoop is the Southwest Airlines of storage technology.  Like Southwest Airlines with its one type of aircraft, no-frills approach, offering a scalable low cost option, Hadoop has a basic store, sort and group capability, scales through standardization on commodity hardware, and offers a low-cost, scalable alternative to highly specialized data appliances.

 

Hadoop has multiple levels of redundancy (duplication of data) – so, everything written to a Hadoop cluster is copied to three different machines. If one machine goes down, the master node knows where else to go to get that data. Infrastructure guys can replace the failed machine and when it comes back up, Hadoop will copy the stuff over to the new machine and get it ready for future use. 


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