What kind of hardware scales best for Hadoop?
The short answer is dual processor/dual core machines with 4-8GB of RAM using ECC memory, depending upon workflow needs. Machines should be moderately high-end commodity machines to be most cost-effective and typically cost 1/2 – 2/3 the cost of normal production application servers but are not desktop-class machines. This cost tends to be $2-5K. For a more detailed discussion, see MachineScaling page.
