Yahoo!, a leading global Internet company, announced the availability of the Yahoo! distribution of Hadoop at the Second Annual Hadoop Summit. To foster the community collaboration of the Hadoop project, Yahoo! is hosting the summit today in Santa Clara, Calif., co-sponsored by Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, IBM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sun Startup Essentials.

The Yahoo! distribution of Hadoop is based on code available from the Apache Hadoop project, an open source project of the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop is a distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. In response to frequent requests from the Hadoop community, Yahoo! is opening up its investment in Hadoop quality engineering to benefit the larger ecosystem and to increase the pace of innovation around open and collaborative research and development. The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been tested and deployed at Yahoo! on the largest Hadoop clusters in the world.

"We know from our own experience serving half a billion users worldwide requires large-scale distributed systems, and a growing number of other companies and organizations are in need of similar capabilities," said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo! "Yahoo! was a pioneer in developing the Hadoop technology and now Hadoop provides Yahoo! key software infrastructure running on tens of thousands of machines to process data critical to Yahoo!'s core business. By making the Yahoo! distribution of Hadoop generally available, we are contributing back to the Apache Hadoop community so that the ecosystem can benefit from Yahoo!'s quality and scale investments."

"It's exciting to see how the Apache Hadoop project has progressed in the last few years," said Justin Erenkrantz, president of Apache Software Foundation. "We're looking forward to seeing community growth accelerate with Yahoo!'s continued support and focus on quality, ultimately driving more contributors to the Apache Hadoop project."

"The general availability of Yahoo!'s Hadoop source code helps make Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop even more robust and scalable, and we will continue to collaborate with Yahoo! to include their tested source code in our commercial distribution," said Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. "Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop is a complete, enterprise-ready distribution inclusive of key tools, utilities, and full service and support, to help enterprises deploy and manage the Hadoop platform for large-scale data processing and management."

Yahoo! has led the way in developing and is now the primary contributor to Apache Hadoop. In 2006, Hadoop Founder Doug Cutting joined Yahoo!, and the company began making extensive investments in developing Hadoop. Hadoop now underpins many Yahoo! properties including Yahoo! Search, which is the world's largest Hadoop application, processing data for billions of Web search queries that run on Yahoo! every month, as well as Yahoo! Mail and various content and advertising services. Currently at Yahoo!, Hadoop runs on more than 25,000 servers and analyzes tens of billions of Web pages, multiple petabytes of storage and billions of new records per day.

The event brings together hundreds of members from the Hadoop developer and user communities to learn from and share ideas with each other. Hadoop Summit will focus on the advancements made in the development and deployment of Hadoop and related technologies, as well as case studies of applications being built and deployed on Hadoop and a discussion on future directions for the platform. More information on the Hadoop Summit is available at http://developer.yahoo.com/events/hadoopsummit09/.

The Yahoo! distribution of Hadoop is available through the Yahoo! Developer Network at http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/. More information on Apache Hadoop is available at http://hadoop.apache.org/. Cloudera's distribution for Hadoop, which includes the Yahoo! source code, is available at http://www.cloudera.com/.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. For more information, visit pressroom.yahoo.com or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal.