Meet Mapr, a Competitor to Hadoop Leader Cloudera.
They are said to be building a proprietary replacement for the Hadoop Distributed File System that’s allegedly three times faster than the current open-source version. It comes with snapshots and no NameNode single point of failure (SPOF), and is supposed to be API-compatible with HDFS, so it can be a drop-in replacement.
Lots of famous names in the company, which probably explains why they were able to raise $9m funding without ever shipping anything. I don’t know enough about them right now, but it’ll be interesting to see if they have enough of an advantage to keep an edge on plain Hadoop and HDFS over time, as the open source version catches up.