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title: Release 2.0.0-alpha available date: 2012-05-23

This is the first (alpha) version in the hadoop-2.x series.

This delivers significant major features over the currently stable hadoop-1.x series including:

• HDFS HA for NameNode (manual failover)
• YARN aka NextGen MapReduce
• HDFS Federation
• Performance
• Wire-compatibility for both HDFS and YARN/MapReduce (using protobufs)

Please see the Hadoop 2.0.0-alpha Release Notes for details.