I remember being in a pitch meeting with MapR a few years ago. It was for a large academic institution’s HPC group. We were all very interested in their NFS/HDFS tools, which would have met a very critical need. They just kept talking about the Hadoop workflows, which wouldn’t have flown at all for this group. Most HPC workflows/tools don’t map very well to Hadoop or at the minimum would have required tools to have been rewritten.

We really wanted to spend the money, but as far as I remember, we didn’t end up doing anything more than a test install.

I’d still love a middle option that could handle petabyte scale storage without the Isilon price tag.