The deflate codec just reminded me too, now that JNI support is available in storm, it might be nice to include instructions about how to package libhadoop.so so that storm/Hadoop can pick it up.  It can be a huge speed improvement over the pure java compression/CRC implementations.

Might even be worth it to do some of that on behalf of the user, but that might require some coordination with Hadoop itself so that the native libraries are packaged in a way that would allow us to pull them in.