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CHAPTER
4
Why an Appliance?
Chapter 3 discussed what Hadoop is, its components, and some of the decisions that need to be made to build a cluster. With this in mind, Oracle could have published reference architectures based on its Sun servers to address the needs of their customers. Instead, in January 2012 Oracle released Oracle Big Data Appliance as an engineered system to run Hadoop and the Oracle NoSQL database. But why create an appliance? After all, the foundation of Hadoop and NoSQL databases is to create a platform for distributed computing using commodity hardware. But distributed computing is more complex than simply connecting a bunch ...

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