This week, Hadoop received its first update in more than a year.  Apache 0.23.0 features a number of new and extended functionalities including HDFS federation, which improves the data analytics engine’s ability to scale; and the rewritten MapReduce 2 that allows parallel apps to run on Hadoop while reducing bottlenecks associated with scaling.

This is big news for the Hadoop ecosystem, which is seeing a lot of growth that will be further boosted as its core is being enhanced. This growth is driven by interest from both customers and VCs.

A fresh report by the 451 Group claims that Apache Hadoop and NoSQL startups raised over  $350 million in funding, out of which $157 million  were raised in the period between the end of August to mid-November. Cloudera, the biggest distributor of Hadoop is one of the companies in the spotlight, received received $40 million in a Series D funding round led by Greylock Partners and Accel, with participation from its existing backers.

And the Hadoop ecosystem is expanding in more than one direction.  Companies such as Facebook (which leverages Hbase) are making use of all the different sub-components that go along with the framework.  And, while some use Hadoop to power their infrastructure, other providers extend their own products with the data management platform.

The newly launched Revolution R 5.0 by Revolution Analytics was unveiled yesterday, and features a few major improvements. Among them is support for Hadoop via the R analytics-oriented  programming language and the ability to add open-source components.  Splunk, another data analytics company that makes a data aggregation tool, released a special version of its software that plugs into Hadoop. Splunk Enterprise with Hadoop lets user manage the data stored in their Hadoop deployment, adds an extra layer of security and more.