Apache releases Hadoop 1.0 big data analytics platform

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the first official release of its Hadoop big data analytics platform, confirming it is ready for use by businesses.

After six years of development, ASF has released Hadoop 1.0, saying the platform is now stable enough to be relied upon for big data crunching by any organisation.

The NoSQL Hadoop technology allows applications to work quickly with thousands of nodes and petabytes of structured and unstructured data. Hadoop is an entirely open source project built by a global community of developers using the Java programming language.

"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 vice president of Apache Hadoop Arun Murthy.

"Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organisations to store, process and query vast torrents of data and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security."

Hadoop is a collection of software including: a distributed file system, which can handle large amounts of data storage; map reduce, which processes the data; and common, which is the shared infrastructure that supports the project.

Companies can use Hadoop for the types of analyses that business intelligence tools and big data SQL analysis tools are not designed to handle.

For example, Hadoop may be used by companies to analyse the past behaviour of users on their web sites, or to predict future behaviour.

Hadoop is already used by some of the largest internet firms in the world, including Amazon Web Services, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Foursquare, HP, LinkedIn, Netflix, Rackspace, Twitter and Yahoo.

Other companies such as IBM and EMC have integrated Hadoop into their offerings to allow their customers to process large amounts of unstructured data.

According to a recent Ovum study, around one-third of organisations in the US, Europe and Asia that process large amounts of information plan to invest in big data analytics in the next year.

Ovum polled 150 organisations across the public and private sector that store more than 1TB of data.