HBase is a distributed, scalable, big data store that is modeled after Google's BigTable. It uses HDFS for storage and is written in Java. HBase provides a key-value data model and allows for fast lookups by row keys. It does not support SQL queries or transactions. Clients can access HBase data via Java APIs, REST, Thrift or MapReduce. The architecture consists of a master server and multiple region servers that host regions and serve client requests.