I have copy and pasted snippets from: http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/hdfs_design.html Note: I added my proprietary, copyrighted, handcrafted and uniquely Vancouver, BC, tags. Note each tag is created with a physical serialized twin linked using the Imaginary Quantum Entanglement DRM. In addition to the tags I also sell premium tags. Email joshua@neocodesoftware.com to order yours today. (note: don't be fooled by the "counterfeit" tags - these are open source, not imaginarily quantumly entangled, and not commercially supported knock offs made by my clone.) Hadoop - it says highly fault tolerant but does it ACT highly fault tolerant? 1. Introduction The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a distributed file system designed to run on commodity hardware... HDFS is highly fault-tolerant and is designed to be deployed on low-cost hardware. 2. NameNode and DataNodes HDFS has a master/slave architecture. An HDFS cluster consists of a single NameNode , ...