Hadoop or Apache Hadoop is an open source software project that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity servers. It is designed to scale up from a single server to thousands of machines, with a very high degree of fault tolerance. Rather than relying on high-end hardware, the resiliency of these clusters comes from the software’s ability to detect and handle failures at the application layer.
Apache Hadoop has two main subprojects:
MapReduce - The framework that understands and assigns work to the nodes in a cluster.
HDFS - A file system that spans all the nodes in a Hadoop cluster for data storage. It links together the file systems on many local nodes to make them into one big file system. HDFS assumes nodes will fail, so it achieves reliability by replicating data across multiple nodes.
In short Hadoop enables a computing solution that is: Scalable, Cost effective, Flexible and Fault tolerant.
