The Apache Software Foundation has announced Apache Hadoop v1.0, the Open Source software framework for scalable, distributed computing. It enables data-intensive distributed applications to work with thousands of nodes and exabytes of data, connecting thousands of servers to process and analyze data at supercomputing speed.

The project’s latest release marks a major milestone six years in the making, and has achieved the level of stability and enterprise-readiness to earn the 1.0 designation. It comes with  HBase transaction logging, with performance enhanced access to local files for HBase.

Inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System papers, it is used by many of the big players in the tech field; Amazon.com, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, Twitter, and Yahoo!

It is a powerful success story of a open source community project, involving feedback from hundreds of users, data scientists, systems engineers, and with extensive testing over it's 6 years of development. The open source cloud computing framework was created by Doug Cutting, who named it after his son's toy elephant. It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project.