Hadoop, the Big Data processing and analytics framework, isn’t your average open source project.

“If you look at a lot of the open source software that’s been popular out of Apache and elsewhere, its sort of like an open source replacement for something you can already get elsewhere,” said Todd Lipcon, a senior software engineer at Cloudera. “I think Hadoop is kind of unique in that it’s the only option for doing this kind of analysis.”

Lipcon is right. Open Office is an open source office suite alternative to Microsoft Office. MySQL is an open source database alternative to Oracle. Hadoop is an open source Big Data framework alternative for …. Well, there is no alternative.

“If you want to do [Big Data] analysis, Hadoop is the only choice,” Lipcon told SiliconANGLE Founder and Lead Blogger John Furrier live inside theCube recently.

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Furrier, who helped pioneer social media at Podtech and is shaking up the Valley with SiliconANGLE’s blend of news, analysis and live TV, has been covering the burgeoning Big Data movement since its inception. He landed this exclusive interview with Hadoop whiz-kid Lipcon at the Cloudera headquarters just as the Hadoop market is reaching a boiling point.

Lipcon expounded on the benefits of Hadoop and its numerous components, including HBase, an open source semi-structured database that uses the Hadoop Distributed File System as its storage layer.

“You can just run HBase on one node if you’re a small company. And then if your scale really takes off you can store up to a petabyte or more in a single HBase instance across 1,000 machines and it continues to work and perform as you expect and scale linearly with no new coding on your point,” Lipcon said.


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Lipcon also talked about what its like to work at Cloudera, which Furrier dubbed “the face of Hadoop,” a moniker that is likely to stick.

“It’s a pretty cool company because we have some engineers working just on open source,” while others are developing Cloudera’s commercial Hadoop management platform that lets users monitor Hadoop deployments and perform capacity planning.

“So we have this nice mix of open source good will that we do for the community and a business model that I think makes a lot of sense,” Lipcon said.

During the interview, Furrier also announced the creation of a new internet TV channel that will cover all things Big Data inside and out.

“Tell all the Cloudera guys to get ready for some interviewing,” Furrier told Lipcon. “We’re going to launch a new program, just green-lighted today, called HadoopTV.com. It’s going to be an open platform where we’ll talk to Cloudera engineers, we’ll talk to Apache engineers; We’ll get vendors and geeks on. We’re going to be the PBS of Cloudera and Hadoop.”

Check out the full interview below. There’s a lot more really great insights from Lipcon on other developments underway in the Apache Hadoop project and what its like working with a large community of contributors from various companies.