Apache Hadoop technology is transforming the economics and dynamics of big data initiatives by supporting new processes and architectures that can help cut costs, increase revenue and create competitive advantage. An open source software project that enables the distributed processing and storage of large data sets across clusters of commodity servers, Hadoop can scale from a single server to thousands, as demands change. Primary Hadoop components include the Hadoop Distributed File System for storing large files and the Hadoop distributed parallel processing framework (known as MapReduce).