Although most IT organizations today are probably only vaguely aware of the Hadoop distributed file system and database based on Java, you can tell something is gaining momentum when middleware companies start supporting it as a data source.
For example, Talend, a provider of open source middleware, just added support for Hadoop to its namesake data integration software.
According to Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing for Talend, Talend might be at the front end of Hadoop support because both Talend and Hadoop have a lot of open source supporters that want to deploy both technologies in the same project.
But as the amount of data that needs to be analyzed continues to expand, it’s also becoming clear that interest in lower-cost approaches to managing and storing data is growing as well. Hadoop may not be able to match a relational database in terms of performance, but there are massive amounts of data that don’t require that level of performance. So Hadoop represents a major opportunity to cut back on database licensing costs in favor of a new model for managing data that was specifically developed to deal with data generated by Web 2.0 applications.
There’s no doubt that other middleware providers will be providing support for Hadoop as well. And as interest in ‘Big Data’ products continues to grow, it’s only a matter of time before Hadoop comes to an enterprise near you.