Most companies today are already using scaled up servers to host their medium size warehouses (think Teradata or Exadata). That approach is very expensive (> mi

Most companies today are already using scaled up servers to host their medium size warehouses (think Teradata or Exadata). That approach is very expensive (> millions of dollars), only works well with well-defined data, and does not scale well beyond a few TBs. Hadoop is not just about running large jobs on very large data. Hadoop also makes sense when trying to scale on commodity hardware or running ad hoc queries (which can target a small amount of data) on medium to large data sets.