Hadoop is a hot topic as companies like Facebook, eBay, Yahoo have system power by Hadoop.
This page documents an alphabetical list of institutions that are using Hadoop for educational or production uses. Companies that offer services on or based around Hadoop are listed in Distributions and Commercial Support .
I have been waiting for MapR to post more information on their Hadoop competitor, but nothing is on their site. But, GigaOm has the scoop on the latest status.
What Is Mapr Doing?
They are said to be building a proprietary replacement for the Hadoop Distributed File System that’s allegedly three times faster than the current open-source version. It comes with snapshots and no NameNode single point of failure (SPOF), and is supposed to be API-compatible with HDFS, so it can be a drop-in replacement.
MapR's potential to be three times faster in theory reduces the compute requirements a third. Even at a 50% reduction, it is hard to not look at the potential energy savings.