Version 4 of Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) also comes with a number of resiliency improvements that should allow organizations to "run more critical workloads on the system," said Charles Zedlewski, Cloudera vice president of products.

CDH4 expands the number of computational processes that can be executed under Hadoop, Zedlewski explained. Typically, Hadoop will use MapReduce, which breaks a data analysis task up across multiple nodes, and then collects the results as the nodes complete their portions of the job.

CDH4 introduces a new feature called coprocessors, which allows software programs to be embedded with the data itself. The programs are executed when certain conditions are met, such as when the average of a set of numbers hits a predefined threshold. The idea is similar to database triggers and stored procedures. The programs reside with the data, which is spread across multiple servers.

Coprocessors allow for more flexibility than a MapReduce operation. "We can now do more real-time or continuous operation on data in motion," Zedlewski said. "This allows you to push data-intensive operations into the data layer and parallelize the workload there."

CDH4 also allows users to implement their own data analysis frameworks apart from MapReduce. "You no longer have to shoehorn all your user workloads into one paradigm," Zedlewski said. "MapReduce is a very linear process, but sometimes things need to work on an iterative process."