Alpine Miner is a drag-and-drop approach to big data analysis - and it's free to download.

It is arguable that the big data revolution is making a lot of new things possible from language translation to marketing intelligence. The big problem has always been that you need to master languages and techniques like Hadoop or the R programming language. Now EMC, a company better known for data storage systems, has made available for free a graphical language that significantly lowers the bar to big data.

Basically Alpine Miner is a drag-and-drop approach to processing data. You can select an analysis type such as clustering or classification and simply drop the icon into the processing pipeling. It doesn't exactly bring big data analysis to everyone because you still have to understand the basic ideas but you don't have to worry about how to program or parallelize the procedures.

The new Community edition from EMC Greenplum includes Apine Miner, Madlib and open source parallel implementation of a range of analytic algorithms and Database CE a massively parallel processing database derived from PostgreSQL.  It should run on any Intel 64 bit machines but Dell and Sun servers are used in Greenplums own sepcialist hardware.

The only problem is the the community edition of is only free for non-production use and it isn't open source. At the bottom of it all this is intended to push you in the direction of using the full products, and perhaps even buying one of their big data analysis devices. 

You can download the community edition from

http://community.greenplum.com/

There is also a VMWare appliance that you can use without having to install anything.

More information on Alpine Miner:

www.alpineminer.org