From the Apache Software Foundation Blog: The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Hadoop™ v1.0

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an all-volunteer group of developers, stewards and incubators of technology. They bring us many of the technologies powering our enterprises and consumer solutions and are continuing to innovate in ways that are absolutely amazing and enjoyable to try to track. One of the greatest projects at the ASF is Hadoop, a capability that may turn out to be the greatest innovation of the century. I have been accused of hyperbole for emphasis in the past, so please dig into the facts of this capability and judge for yourself. As for me, something that holds the potential of letting us make more sense of more data holds great promise. It is contributing to our understanding of genetics, medicine, healthcare, defense, crime/crime-prevention and so many other fields.

Whether or not it is the innovation of the century, only time will tell. But one thing for sure, it will pay for IT professionals to track this topic closely.

With that introduction I will not copy below a release from the Apache Software Foundation Blog:

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Hadoop™ v1.0

Open Source “Big Data” Cloud computing platform powers millions of compute-hours to process exabytes of data for Amazon.com, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, HP, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, Twitter, Yahoo!, and more.

4 January 2012 —FOREST HILL, MD— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache™ Hadoop™ v1.0, the Open Source software framework for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. The project’s latest release marks a major milestone six years in the making, and has achieved the level of stability and enterprise-readiness to earn the 1.0 designation.

A foundation of Cloud computing and at the epicenter of “big data” solutions, Apache Hadoop enables data-intensive distributed applications to work with thousands of nodes and exabytes of data. Hadoop enables organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, process, manage and analyze the growing volumes of data being created and collected every day. Apache Hadoop connects thousands of servers to process and analyze data at supercomputing speed.

“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun C. Murthy, Vice President of Apache Hadoop. “Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security.

“Originating with technologies developed by Yahoo, Google, and other Web 2.0 pioneers in the mid-2000s, Hadoop is now central to the big data strategies of enterprises, service providers, and other organizations,” wrote James Kobielus in the independent Forrester Research, Inc. report, “Enterprise Hadoop: The Emerging Core Of Big Data” (October 2011).

Dubbed a “Swiss army knife of the 21st century” and named “Innovation of the Year” by the 2011 Media Guardian Innovation Awards, Apache Hadoop is widely deployed at organizations around the globe, including industry leaders from across the Internet and social networking landscape such as Amazon Web Services, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, HP, LinkedIn, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, Twitter, and Yahoo!. Other technology leaders such as Microsoft and IBM have integrated Apache Hadoop into their offerings. Yahoo!, an early pioneer, hosts the world’s largest known Hadoop production environment to date, spanning more than 42,000 nodes.

“Achieving the 1.0 release status is a momentous achievement from the Apache Hadoop community and the result of hard development work and shared learnings over the years,” said Jay Rossiter, senior vice president, Cloud Platform Group at Yahoo!. “Apache Hadoop will continue to be an important area of investment for Yahoo!. Today Hadoop powers every click at Yahoo!, helping to deliver personalized content and experiences to more than 700 million consumers worldwide.”

“Apache Hadoop is in use worldwide in many of the biggest and most innovative data applications,” said Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of Hortonworks. “The v1.0 release combines proven scalability and reliability with security and other features that make Apache Hadoop truly enterprise-ready.”

“Gartner is seeing a steady increase in interest in Apache Hadoop and related “big data” technologies, as measured by substantial growth in client inquiries, dramatic rises in attendance at industry events, increasing financial investments and the introduction of products from leading data management and data integration software vendors,” said Merv Adrian, Research Vice President at Gartner, Inc. “The 1.0 release of Apache Hadoop marks a major milestone for this open source offering as enterprises across multiple industries begin to integrate it into their technology architecture plans.”

Apache Hadoop v1.0 reflects six years of development, production experience, extensive testing, and feedback from hundreds of knowledgeable users, data scientists, systems engineers, bringing a highly stable, enterprise-ready release of the fastest-growing big data platform. It includes support for:

• HBase (sync and flush support for transaction logging)

• Security (strong authentication via Kerberos)

• Webhdfs (RESTful API to HDFS)

• Performance enhanced access to local files for HBase

• Other performance enhancements, bug fixes, and features

• All version 0.20.205 and prior 0.20.2xx features

“We are excited to celebrate Hadoop’s milestone achievement,” said William Lazzaro, Director of Engineering at Concurrent Computer Corporation. “Implementing Hadoop at Concurrent has enabled us to transform massive amounts of real-time data into actionable business insights, and we continue to look forward to the ever-improving iterations of Hadoop.”

“Hadoop, the first ubiquitous platform to emerge from the ongoing proliferation of Big Data and noSQL technologies, is set to make the transition from Web to Enterprise technology in 2012,” said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, “driven by adoption and integration by every major vendor in the commercial data analytics market. The Apache Software Foundation plays a crucial role in supporting the platform and its ecosystem.”

Availability and Oversight

As with all Apache products, Apache Hadoop software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Hadoop release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://hadoop.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as “The Apache Way,” more than 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Hortonworks, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

“Apache”, “Apache Hadoop”, and “ApacheCon” are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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