HBase is an open source, column-oriented database built on top of Hadoop that allows for the storage and retrieval of large amounts of sparse data. It provides random real-time read/write access to this data stored in Hadoop and scales horizontally. HBase features include automatic failover, integration with MapReduce, and storing data as multidimensional sorted maps indexed by row, column, and timestamp. The architecture consists of a master server (HMaster), region servers (HRegionServer), regions (HRegions), and Zookeeper for coordination.