The document introduces the Hadoop ecosystem, which provides an approach for handling large amounts of data across commodity hardware. Hadoop is an open source software framework that uses MapReduce and HDFS to allow distributed storage and processing of large datasets across clusters of computers. It has been adopted by many large companies as a standard for batch processing of big data. The document describes how Hadoop is used by organizations to combine different datasets, remove data silos, and enable new types of experiments and analyses.