The Hadoop project, which Doug Cutting (now Cloudera's Chief Architect) co-founded in 2006, is an effort to create open source IMPLEMENTATIONS of internal systems used by Web-SCALE companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook to manage and process massive DATA volumes. Hadoop, combined with related ecosystem PROJECTS, enables distributed, parallel processing of huge AMOUNTS of data across industry-standard servers (with storage and processing occurring on the same machines), and it can scale indefinitely.

The Hadoop project, which Doug Cutting (now Cloudera's Chief Architect) co-founded in 2006, is an effort to create open source implementations of internal systems used by Web-scale companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook to manage and process massive data volumes. Hadoop, combined with related ecosystem projects, enables distributed, parallel processing of huge amounts of data across industry-standard servers (with storage and processing occurring on the same machines), and it can scale indefinitely.