Hadoop Summit North America 2013 is in a week.  Before we get a chance to see what has been happening in the world of Hadoop, let’s take a look back at what transpired at last year’s conference.

8.5 out of 10–the rating SiliconANGLE CEO and founder John Furrier gave last year’s event.  It was sold out, sessions were filled with attendees, and people weren’t there to sell things but were more interested in market opportunities. This is the legacy of the interest the community has in Hadoop and what we can expect to arise from the next summit.

2012’s event was big on Big Data analytics platform and consolidation.  Attendees were seeking for new ways to extract the analytics from databases as well as a platform that would allow them to scale up quickly.

VMwarelaunched “Serengeti,” a virtualization-aware Hadoop configuration and management tool and the result of a collaboration with Cloudera, Infochimps, Greenplum, HortonWorks and MapR, debuted at Hadoop Summit 2012. All bringing to the field new and innovative software technology to address expectations and provide solutions for a growing userbase.

NetApp announced that it entered a strategic alliance with Hortonworks and introduced the Open Solution for Hadoop Rack which is optimized for Hadoop deployments and data driven workloads aside from bringing together networking, compute, and storage resources in the same box.  The solution is powered by NetApp’s E-Series and ONTAP software.

Facebook, a big fan of Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), announced at last year’s event that its AvatarNode has been open sourced to provide a two-node NameNode with manual failover and promised to “integrate it with a general high-availability framework that will permit unattended, automated, and safe failover.” We hope to see Facebook talk more about their experience this year.

But the biggest announcement came before the event, when Hortonworks announced its first product, the Hortonworks Data Platform.  The Data Platform is based on the first and most trusted release of Hadoop and provides a solution that allows users to recover and get back to business automatically in case of a drive failure via a cluster powered by the latter version.

Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden opened the event with a keynote speech highlighting the importance of making Hadoop viable for the enterprise and raised the concern of fragmentation in the Hadoop ecosystem stating that a single, open source framework is required to achieve a “critical mass of adoption.”