In this data era, massive volumes of data are being generated every second in variety of domains such as Geoscience, Social Web, Finance, e-Commerce, Health Care, Climate modelling, Physics, Astronomy, Government sectors etc. Hadoop has been well-recognized as de factobig data processing platform that have been extensively adopted, and is currently widely used, in many application domains processing Big Data. Even though it is considered as an efficient solution for such complex query processing, it has its own limitation when the data to be processed exhibit interest locality. The data required for any query execution follows grouping behavior wherein only a part of the Big-Data is accessed frequently. During such scenarion, the time taken to execute a queryand return results, increases exponentially as the amount of data increases leading to much waiting time for the user. Since Hadoop default data placement strategy (HDDPS) does not consider such grouping behavior, it does not perform efficiently resulting in lacunas such as decreased local map task execution, increased query execution time etc. Hence proposed an Optimal Data Placement Strategy (ODPS) based on grouping semantics. In this paper we experiment the significance oftwo most promising clustering techniques viz. Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) and Markov Clustering (MCL) in grouping aware data placement for data intensive applications having interest locality. Initially user access pattern is identified by dynamically analyzing history log.Then both clustering techniques (HAC & MCL) are separately applied over the access pattern to obtain independent clusters. These clusters are interpreted and validated to extract the Optimal Data Groupings (ODG). Finally proposed strategy reorganizes the default data layouts in HDFSbased on ODG to achieve maximum parallel execution per group subjective to Load Balancer and Rack Awareness. Our proposed strategy is tested in 10 node cluster placed in a multi rack with Hadoop installed in every node deployed in cloud platform. Proposed strategy reduces the query execution time, significantly improves the data locality and has proved to be more efficient for massive datasets processing in heterogeneous distributed environment. Also MCL shows a marginal improved performance over HAC for queries exhibiting interest localities.