We're developing Hoop (REST API for HDFS) plugin, and also Stargate (REST API for HBase). It requires additional setup at the infra-side, but still very useful and performs well.
You can feed Twitter stream by writing in_twitter plugin. That will 30 lines of Ruby code :-)
This release includes transparent large page? This will hugely increase the performance of memory-consuming applications (c,f. Redis, HBase, MongoDB, etc.). I confirmed at RHEL6.