What’s unique about this architecture is that it’s completely “open” solution. Users can use any distribution of hadoop in any configuration. The platform offers all the flexibility in adapting to rapidly maturing hadoop distributions and various eco-system tools and utilities. The platform has been validated with Cloudera and Hortonworks distribution of hadoop. But there is no reason to use the same platform with IBM, MapR , Intel , apache or any other flavor of hadoop if the users decides to switch. This architecture has successfully decoupled storage and compute from a traditional hadoop design, which offers independent scaling of compute and storage in a cluster. The NetApp E-5400 series storage arrays provide enterprise grade reliability and performance for all the HDFS data served in a cluster. The data is protected using raid configured disks, which means the datanodes in the HDFS cluster will have zero effect, in case of a disk failure. This will result in guaranteed job performance catering to strict SLAs.