I really appreciate all your suggestions, but from where I am and considering the place I work at (a rather small office in Argentina) these things aren't that affordable (monetarily and bureaucratically speaking). That being said, I managed to get my hands around some more equipment and I may be able to set up a small cluster of three or four nodes - all running in a local network with Ubuntu. What I should learn now is exactly how to configure all that is needed in order to create it, as I have virtually no idea, nor experience in this kind of tasks. Luckily, goggling led me to some tutorials and documentation on the subject. I'll be following this guide for now:
http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_(Multi-Node_Cluster) I'll let know what comes out this (surely, something on the messy side of things). Any more suggestions/ideas are more than welcome. Many thanks, again.
