Apache Accumulo is a sorted, distributed key-value store built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift. It is based on Google's BigTable design with some improvements like cell-based access control and server-side programming capabilities. Accumulo stores data based on a row key, column family, qualifier, and visibility label, and can perform fast lookups and scans of large datasets in a distributed environment due to its scalable architecture.