What does commodity hardware mean?

Question

I see this term being used a lot whenever hardware specifications of Hadoop are being described.

Answer 1

The term, 'commodity hardware' stands for lower cost systems which aren't of high quality or specifications. One of these hardware types is RAM because, especially in Big Data, a lot of specific services exist that require RAM and their execution is highly reliant on it. One of the major advantages of using Hadoop (in the case of Big Data) is that we can use 'commodity hardware' for running our operations. This means that an organization or an individual does not have to invest in high end hardware specifically for big data.