Corporate efforts to gather business intelligence from the massive volumes of data generated by web server logs and social media have led to a surge of interest in open-source Hadoop software, according to a report in Computerworld.

Hadoop is designed to process terabytes and even petabytes of unstructured and structured data. It breaks large workloads into smaller data blocks that are distributed across a cluster of commodity hardware for faster processing.

Facebook, eBay, Amazon and Yahoo use the technology, and it is increasingly being adopted by industries such as banking, advertising, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, said analyst Stephen O'Grady.