Just 12 months ago, even the largest organisations lacked the
infrastructure, tools and skills to turn large datasets into
business insight. Today, though, the world has changed. A
combination of low-cost, commodity hardware and great open-
source software are lowering the Big Data bar for organisations
of all types and sizes. Put simply, open-source solutions are
allowing organisations to spin up hundreds of servers to support
Big Data services in seconds, and pay only for the resources
they use. Here are just a few of the reasons why open-source
software is the best foundation for Big Data: 1) Support for the
latest Big Data tools While proprietary operating systems (OSs)
are upgraded every two to three years, some open-source OSs
offer a much shorter release cycle and longer support periods.
This means that all the latest Big Data tools are already
supported - from the latest releases of Hadoop and Cassandra, to
MongoDB and Couchbase; all the right tools that organisations
need to get the most from their da