Last week we participated in the annual Hadoop Summit held in San Jose, CA. When we first met with Hortonworks about the Summit many months back they mentioned this year’s Hadoop Summit would be promoting Reference Architectures from many companies in the Hadoop Ecosystem. This was great to hear as we had previously presented results from a large round of testing on Network and Compute Considerations for Hadoop at Hadoop World 2011 last November and we were looking to do a second round of testing to take our original findings and test/develop a set of best practices around them including failure and connectivity options. Further the set of validation demystifies the one key Enterprise ask “Can we use the same architecture/component for Hadoop deployments?”.   Since a lot of the value of Hadoop is seen once it is integrated into current enterprise data models the goal of the testing was to not only define a reference architecture, but to define a set of best practices so Hadoop can be integrated into current enterprise architectures.