Defining HDFS

The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), as the name suggests, is a distributed filesystem based on the lines of the Google File System written in Java. In practice, HDFS resembles closely any other UNIX filesystem with support for common file operations such as ls, cp, rm, du, cat, and so on. However what makes HDFS stand out, despite its simplicity, is its mechanism to handle node failure in the Hadoop cluster without effectively changing the search time for accessing stored files. The HDFS cluster consists of two major components: DataNodes and NameNode.

HDFS has a unique way of storing data on HDFS clusters (cheap commodity networked commodity computers). It splits the regular file in smaller chunks called blocks and then makes an exact number of copies of such chunks depending on the replication factor for that file. After that, it copies such chunks to different DataNodes of the cluster.