Hadoop

If you are just digging in, many resources are available to help you. I suggest you start with these:

• http://hadoop.apache.org
• http://hortonworks.com/
• http://www.cloudera.com/

Apache is the owner of the Hadoop project. Hortonworks and Cloudera are currently the top 2 vendors who provide a distribution of the Hadoop software.

These books have been very helpful in getting up to speed with Hadoop application, concepts and support:

• http://datafoam.com/hadoop-definitive-guide
• http://datafoam.com/hadoop-operations
• http://hadoopilluminated.com/

Another company in the big data space that you should take a look at can be found at http://pivotal.io.  Pivotal is combining Hadoop with the Greenplum database clustering technology to interesting effect, with a focus on Platform as a Service (PaaS).