Bangalore: Apache Hadoop is the open source software framework supports the running of applications on large clusters of commodity hardware. This framework transparently provides both reliability and data motion to applications. Hadoop is designed in such a way that it provides very high aggregate bandwidth and the framework can handle node failures automatically. It also enables applications to interact with numerous other systems and work with petabytes of data. So why are the Hardware giants involved here?

‘cause the only way to play the big data game today is Hadoop.

EMC has its own Hadoop distribution and now Intel has joined the cause, both are primarily hardware vendors. The big hardware manufacturing giants are joining in the competition for the virtual domination of tomorrow – Big Data. Josh Klahr, vice president of products at EMC Greenplum, wasn't exactly shy about mentioning the Cloudera comparison, “We want to be competitive with Cloudera. When we beta (Pivotal HD) with customers we've been able to stop a Cloudera purchase decision. Every account we go into there's increasing interest and adoption of Hadoop. The interest ranges from experimental to large production deployments.”

Like EMC, the overarching idea behind Intel's distribution is to deliver massive amounts of big data for the purpose of enabling better business decisions while also identifying potential security threats more quickly. However the bigger picture dictates that Intel is beefing up its portfolio for the datacenter -- both for analytics purposes as well as offering a framework that can connect and manage devices within an entire corporation in a scalable manner.

Ultimately, the computing needs of big data will result in more hardware---servers, storage and networking and optimized Hadoop for EMC storage and Intel processors makes a lot of sense.

Hardware is ultimately a bad business as software begins to dominate the data center.

Read More: Meet James Hamilton: Amazon's Star Engineer, Once a Car Mech / 5 Ways to Spot and Score Bad IP Clients