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.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.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/.