Occasionally in the midst of our voluminous coverage of events, the basics often get “lost in the shuffle,” as it were.  With that in mind, unless you watched every single minute of our Hadoop World coverage, you might be asking yourself, “Just what is Hadoop?”

Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera, sat down with SiliconAngle’s John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante to talk about the origins of Hadoop, what types of problems it solves, and the types of customers that use it.

“Back in the day, if you had a data problem, if you needed to run business analytics, you wrote the biggest check you could to Sun Microsystems, and you bought a great big single-box central server.  Any money that was left over, you handled to Oracle for database licenses, and you installed that database on that box, and that was where you went for data.  That was your temple. of information” Olson said.  “There’s a problem with that strategy, and that is, data is growing faster than computers are getting bigger.  That means, that in the long term, you can no longer have one box with all your data.”

Olson continued, “Data needs to be spread across, many many servers.  This system was built by the biggest we properties on the planet who ran into that problem…and built a software system that knew how to coordinate/interoperate, and could run really powerful, new analytics.”

Get the full crash course on Hadoop by watching the video below: