> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.pentaho.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.pentaho.com/install/9.3-install/use-hadoop-with-pentaho/pentaho-big-data-and-hadoop/about-hadoop.md).

# About Hadoop

The Apache Hadoop software library is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using simple programming models. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. Rather than rely on hardware to deliver high-availability, the library itself is designed to detect and handle failures at the application layer, so delivering a highly-available service on top of a cluster of computers, each of which may be prone to failures.

A Hadoop platform consists of a Hadoop kernel, a [MapReduce](http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/MapReduce) model, a distributed file system, and often a number of related projects, such as [Apache Hive](http://hive.apache.org/), [Apache HBase](http://hbase.apache.org/), and others.

A Hadoop Distributed File System, commonly referred to as HDFS, is a Java-based, distributed, scalable, and portable file system for the Hadoop framework.


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