Big data systems aren't about squeezing every drop of performance out of the hardware. They're about being able to scale your solution up effortlessly. Having

Big data systems aren't about squeezing every drop of performance out of the hardware. They're about being able to scale your solution up effortlessly. Having a uniform programming model so that you don't have to rewrite your solution N times when you go from a small test dataset to production data, to 1000x the data. It's also about using a system that other people use, so that you can actually hire admins and service companies with experience in maintaining your solution.