Replacing Hadoop HDFS
with Modern Object
Storage

The future is disaggregated, S3-Compatible and Kubernetes-Native - in other words, something other than Hadoop HDFS.

MinIO is the only object storage platform that has the performance and scale to step in and replace legacy, but mission critical Hadoop HDFS deployments.

Disaggregated

Separating compute and storage simply makes sense today. Storage needs to, outpace compute - as much as 10-1. The compute nodes are stateless and optimized with more CPU cores and memory. Storage nodes are stateful, can be I/O optimized with a greater number of denser drives and higher bandwidth. By disaggregating, enterprises can achieve superior economics, better manageability, improved scalability and enhanced total cost of ownership. HDFS cannot make this transition. When you leave data-locality, Hadoop HDFS’ strength becomes its weakness.

Cloud-Native

Hadoop was designed for MapReduce computing, where data and compute had to be co-located. As a result, Hadoop needs its own job scheduler, resource manager, storage and compute. This is fundamentally incompatible with container based architectures where everything is elastic, lightweight and multi-tenant. In contrast, MinIO was born in the cloud and is designed for containers and orchestration via Kubernetes, making it the ideal technology to transition to when retiring legacy HDFS instances.

Modern Data Ready

Hadoop was purpose built for machine data where “unstructured data” means large (GiB to TiB sized) log files. When used as a general purpose storage platform where true unstructured data is in play, the prevalence of small objects (KB to MB) greatly impairs Hadoop HDFS as the name nodes were never designed to scale in this fashion. MinIO excels at any file/object size (0 to 5 TiB).

Open Source

The enterprises that adopted Hadoop did so out of a preference for open source technologies. The ability to inspect, the freedom from lock-in and the comfort that comes from a tens of thousands of users has real value. MinIO is also 100% open source ensuring that organizations can stay true to their goals while upgrading their experience.

Simple

Simplicity is hard. It takes work, discipline and above all, commitment. MinIO’s simplicity is legendary and is the result of a philosophical commitment to making our software easy to deploy, use, upgrade and scale. Even Hadoop’s fans will tell you it is complex. To do more with less, you need to migrate to MinIO.

Performant

Hadoop rose to prominence on its ability to deliver big data performance. They were, for the better part of a decade, the benchmark for enterprise-grade analytics. Not anymore. MinIO has proven in multiple benchmarks that it is materially faster than Hadoop. This means better performance on Spark, Presto, Flink and other modern analytic workloads.

The combination of MinIO’s simplicity, manageability, scalability, performance coupled with the fact that it was built for the world of disaggregation mean that the total cost of ownership is materially lower than traditional or even modern implementations of Hadoop HDFS. With MinIO, enterprises can do more, connect to more, grow more and all at lower price point - both today and over time.

Benchmark

Lightweight

MinIO’s server binary is all of 45 MB. Despite its size, it is powerful enough to run the datacenter, yet still small enough to live comfortably at the edge. There is no such alternative in the Hadoop world. What it means to enterprises is that your S3 applications can access data anywhere, anytime and with the same API.

Resilient

MinIO protects data with per-object, inline erasure coding, which is far more efficient than HDFS alternatives which came after replication and never gained adoption. In addition, MinIO’s bitrot detection ensures that it will never read corrupted data - capturing and healing corrupted objects on the fly. MinIO also supports cross-region, active-active replication. Finally, MinIO supports a complete object locking framework offering both Legal Hold and Retention (with Governance and Compliance modes).

Software Defined

Hadoop HDFS’ successor isn’t a hardware appliance, it is software running on commodity hardware. That is what MinIO is - software. Like Hadoop HDFS, MinIO is designed to take full advantage of commodity servers. With the ability to leverage NVMe drives and 100 GbE networking, MinIO can shrink the datacenter - improving operational efficiency and manageability.

Secure

MinIO supports multiple, sophisticated server-side encryption schemes to protect data - wherever it may be - in flight or at rest. MinIO’s approach assures confidentiality, integrity and authenticity with negligible performance overhead. Server side and client side encryption are supported using AES-256-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305 and AES-CBC ensuring application compatibility. Furthermore, MinIO supports industry-leading key management systems (KMS).