Awesome! Now if we can just get HBase to update it's prereqs and bump it's version, I can have some symmetry in my life! On a more serious note - is anyone using HDFS for something like the WebHDFS stuff was designed? We're currently looking at HDFS right now for an Event Store mechanism, but it appears to me to be pretty large file / stream oriented, and I'm wondering how it will stack up if we want to do something…
You can try out MapR's Hadoop distribution, which uses its own filesystem rather than HDFS. The MapR filesystem is not append-only, handles small files well, is easily accessible over NFS, etc.
(*Note: I'm a MapR employee, so obviously I'll be biased towards thinking our stuff is great)