(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. Hadoop 2.0 release note