There are some caveats associated with the use of Hadoop, users note.
"The biggest challenge is that this is still young technology with a lot of moving parts," Cope said. "You have to configure and install and integrate a number of components and get them working just so, and that's a non-trivial process."
The relative lack of Hadoop expertise among IT professionals has been another big problem, Befus said.
"It's hard to find anybody with any experience with Hadoop," he said. The fact that Hadoop is not quite a mature technology yet also means that companies need top notch operations staff to handle potential glitches.
Both OpenLogic and Tynt are using a Cloudera Hadoop support tools .
Cloudera offers technical support, implementation help, bug fixes and patches and other handholding services for Hadoop. It also offers a Cloudera distribution of the open source technology featuring core Apache Hadoop and nine related open source tools all integrated into one package.
Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @jaivijayan , or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed . His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com .
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