At the heart of StreamReduce is Storm, a real-time analytics engine that was originally developed at BackType, a company that was acquired by Twitter last year. After the acquisition Twitter allowed lead developer Nathan Marz to finish the project and open source it. Twitter is now using Storm internally.
StreamReduce is essentially Storm hosted in the cloud, with a few extras such as connectors to Apache Hadoop. Nodeable CEO Dave Rosenberg explains that Storm is meant to compliment, not replace, Hadoop. Hadoop is great for running analytics on huge data sets that you’ve already collected, but it’s not good for processing streams of incoming data. That’s where Storm and StreamReduce come in.