I think the article said that you don't need to use Hadoop for everything and that it might be much faster to just use command line tools on a single computer. Of course you might find a use case where the total computing time is massive and in that case a cluster is better. I still don't think many use cases have that problem.
We are doing some simple statistics at work for much smaller data sizes and the computing time is usually around 10-100 ms so it could probably compute small batches at almost network speed.
Definitely. I was reacting to my parent poster, because size does not say everything. 1TB can be small, 1GB can be big - it depends on the amount of computation time that is necessary for whatever processing of the data you do.
We are doing some simple statistics at work for much smaller data sizes and the computing time is usually around 10-100 ms so it could probably compute small batches at almost network speed.