Isilon has a FANTASTIC Hadoop story!  As the other responders identify, Hadoop is designed to duplicate data so the data can be processed by multiple servers at the same time in an effort to deal with Big Data; the old divided and conquer approach.  Some time ago, Isilon developed a very efficient and robust file system called OneFS.  In a effort of amazing insight, Isilon engineers turned the activities of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) into a protocol.  That’s right, Isilon sees HDFS as a protocol like CIFS, NFS, or FTP.  OneFS is already an amazing file system, so if it could speak Hadoop, you would have the best of both worlds; the power of Hadoop with a very resilient time tempered scale-out file system.    Essentially, Isilon satisfies Hadoop’s need to see multiple copies of the same data without having to actually copy it.  That one "simple" innovation is very significant because the data can be analyzed immediately without the need to replicate it. That means, servers do not need to be purchased for the sole purpose of simply hosting the DAS instances.  In other words, with Hadoop on Isilon,  you basically only need to buy the servers required to analyze the data, not house the replicas.  In addition, because you no longer analyze copies of the data, you can actually analyze active data quickly and frequently.  We call it Analyze-in-place or Hadoop-in-place.  PetersonRyan  likes to say that Isilon "Dedupes Hadoop".  Actually he says "Hadoop Dedupe" a lot, but we are trying to not encourage him.   Isilon has developed some early Total Cost of Ownership tools that help reveal the significant benefits of HDFS on Isilon.  The savings in electricity alone is staggering.  Not only that, if you already own Isilon, virtualizing Hadoop (vHadoop) and getting started is fast, easy, and FREE.  Check out EMC’s Hadoop Starter Kit: [URL] I could go on for days regarding the benefits of Isilon for Hadoop like Geo Replication, high availability, etc. but I hope this little taste helps. B. Scott...
What benefits does Isilon bring over HDFS running on compute hosts?
What benefits does Isilon bring over HDFS running on compute hosts?