Reducing the pain and cost of handling big data

Overview

The traditional tools for handling large bodies of unstructured data were proprietary, expensive, and required specialized expertise, putting them out of reach for most organizations. Commonly available solutions such as Hadoop* clusters provide excellent support for manipulating big data on commercial off-the shelf (COTS) servers. Building a Hadoop environment can be intimidating, it doesn't have to be. This paper aims to provide the background you need to take the first steps painlessly.