HDFS is a distributed filesystem that has been designed to run on top of a cluster of industry standard hardware. The architecture of HDFS is such that there is no specific need for high-end hardware. HDFS is a highly fault-tolerant system and can handle failures of nodes in a cluster without loss of data. The primary goal behind the design of HDFS is to serve large data files efficiently. HDFS achieves this efficiency and high throughput in data transfer by enabling streaming access to the data in the filesystem.
The following are the important features of HDFS:
Fault tolerance: Many computers working together as a cluster are bound to have hardware failures. Hardware failures such as disk failures, network connectivity issues, and RAM failures could disrupt processing and cause major downtime. This could lead to data loss as well slippage of critical SLAs. HDFS is designed to withstand such hardware failures by detecting faults and taking recovery actions as required...