Running Hadoop Clusters On Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Computing Service :: Applications Built On Commodity Hardware

Ok so if you set up a virtualized server all your expenses are deductible since you have no equipment to depreciate. I like the idea of the elastic nature of the Amazon setup. It is about right on pricing for dedicated virtual instances, but is more flexible on pricing.

C'mon 10 cents an hour for the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. whoa!

AmazonEC2 - Lucene-hadoop Wiki

Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named Map/Reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or reexecuted on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both Map/Reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework.