The fifth annual Hadoop Summit is a two-day event that will kick off tomorrow, and it’s also one of the two events that we’re covering this week.

Event co-host Hortonworks and a few partners decided that they won’t be holding off their biggest updates until the gathering to starts, and as a result we’ve already been informed of what may be the most significant developer – the debut of the Hortonworks Data Platform, as well as a VMware-powered HA edition.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything more to look forward to.  The Cube at SiliconANGLE.tv will be streaming live coverage and analysis from Hadoop Summit 2012, and a lot of vendors will be attending as well.

Sponsors such as Impetus already reserved their booths and are scheduled to demo their offerings at the big data gathering, while at the same time a number of industry insiders will be making appearances as well.  Hortonworks founding CTO Eric Baldeschwieler, Hadapt CEO Justin Borgman and two dozen other speakers representing Cloudera, SAP, MapR and other companies will be holding keynotes or sessions at Data Summit.  Jeff Kelly wrote up a very inclusive post about the status of the big players and their respective solutions for Wikibon, and a lot of those highlights will be at the very center of discussion starting tomorrow.

Reflecting back on the 2011 Hadoop Summit, Hortonworks and a number of other names as well made a lot of progress in just one year.  Twelve months ago the Yahoo! spin-off was just starting to make progress and many of the firms attending this year were at very early stages of growth as well.