On the other hand, Hadoop also serves a lot more than a computing platform for "big data". The OP probably never worked in a mid/big sized company where sharing

On the other hand, Hadoop also serves a lot more than a computing platform for "big data". The OP probably never worked in a mid/big sized company where sharing data is big issue. HDFS can easily replace a bunch of high maintenance and under performing NFSes. Actually, I think someone should write a Samba clone for HDFS. The next huge thing in the Hadoop ecosystem is Hive. It's like having an unlimited Postgres server that hundreds of people can work on at the same time. Hive's got its quirks and developers need to be educated on how to write the Hive jobs properly, but it gives a lot more back by allowing joins between a lot of datasets that might not be able to fit in one single machine. There is a reason why Hadoop is so popular, especially in enterprises. I think that's why Cloudera got such a high valuation.