Hadoop is an open source legend built by software heroes.

Yet, legends can sometimes be surrounded by myths—these myths can lead IT executives down a path with rose-colored glasses.

Data and data usage is growing at an alarming rate.  Just look at all the numbers from analysts—IDC predicts a 53.4% growth rate for storage this year, AT&T claims 20,000% growth of their wireless data traffic over the past 5 years, and if you take at your own communications channels, its guaranteed that the internet content, emails, app notifications, social messages, and automated reports you get every day has dramatically increased.  This is why companies ranging from McKinsey to Facebook to Walmart are doing something about big data.

Just like we saw in the dot-com boom of the 90s and the web 2.0 boom of the 2000s, the big data trend will also lead companies to make some really bad assumptions and decisions.

Hadoop is certainly one major area of investment for companies to use to solve big data needs. Companies like Facebook that have famously dealt well with large data volumes have publicly touted their successes with Hadoop, so its natural that companies approaching big data first look to the successes of others.  A really smart MIT computer science grad once told me, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This functional fixedness is the cognitive bias to avoid with the hype surrounding Hadoop. Hadoop is a multi-dimensional solution that can be deployed and used in different way. Let’s look at some of the most common pre-concieved notions about Hadoop and big data that companies should know before committing to a Hadoop project: Continue reading →