This document discusses the history and capabilities of Hadoop, an open-source software framework for distributed storage and processing of large datasets across clusters of commodity hardware. It describes how Hadoop was developed from Doug Cutting's work on Nutch in 2002 and its adoption by Yahoo! in 2006. It also provides an overview of Hadoop's key components: HDFS for distributed data storage, MapReduce for distributed computations, and its reliability features which handle faults through replication and rebalancing. Finally, it discusses options for deploying Hadoop in data centers or cloud services.