Forrester Names Top Five Hadoop Distributions

Analysts at Forrester Research have been tracking the upward trajectory of the open source Hadoop big data project for years, and have now pronounced that the platform is  “mandatory” for companies in pursuit of advanced analytics that leverage their data stores.

We've reported before on fragmentation in the Hadoop market, though. There are many vendors offering their own distributions. Now, according to The Forrester Wave report, there are five top Hadoop distributions. Here are the details.

Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, IBM and Pivotal have what Forrester's analysts deem to be the top five distributions.

Notably, the Forrester report singled out MapR in several ways. “MapR Technologies innovates to deliver extreme performance and reliability at scale," it notes. "From day one, MapR Technologies’ strategy has been to engineer a distribution that would allow Hadoop to reach its full performance and scale potential with minimal effort. Enter MapR Technologies’ linchpin – the MapR file system which implements the HDFS API, is fully read/write, and can store trillions of files (versus the complex configuration for HDFS that requires separated namespaces). MapR has also done more than any other distribution vendor under the covers of Hadoop to deliver a reliable and efficient distribution for large-cluster implementations."

Enterprise Hadoop is a market that is not even 10 years old, but Forrester estimates that 100% of all large enterprises will adopt it (Hadoop and related technologies such as Spark) for big data analytics within the next two years.

The report also noted the following for Cloudera: ”Cloudera thinks big and acts fast. Cloudera’s scope and pace of innovation is astounding, but not surprising for the first commercial Hadoop startup, founded in 2008. Cloudera started the SQL-for-Hadoop craze with Impala. It offered the first visual cluster management tool and continues to put significant effort into key features such as security, high availability, governance, and administration. The vendor is anything but shy when it comes to making strategic acquisitions and partnerships to fill enterprise gaps in security, data management, and analytics. Cloudera’s customers value the commercial add-on tools like Cloudera Manager, Cloudera Navigator, and Impala, as well as the company’s overall vision for an enterprise big data platform.”