Organizations have been pushing Hadoop and other distributed systems to their breaking points as they seek to use clusters as shared resources across multiple business units and individual users. Once they hit the performance wall, companies will find it almost impossible to deliver on the big data promise at scale.

In this report, we'll examine the root cause of the performance barriers and explain how today's touted best practices can (and will) fall short. Then we will discuss new ways of addressing the performance challenges so organizations can improve performance, do more with existing resources, and ultimately get the return they are looking for on their big data investments.