Features of HDFS

Here are few important features of HDFS:

1. HDFS doesn't need highly expensive storage devices

2. Uses off the shelf hardware.

3. Rapid Elasticity

4. Need more capacity, just assign some more nodes

5. Scalable

6. Can add or remove nodes with little effort or reconfiguration.

7. Runs entirely in userspace

8. The file system is dynamically distributed across multiple computers

9. Allows for nodes to be added or removed easily
10. 
Highly scalable in a horizontal fashion

11. Highly Fault Tolerant: Automatic Failure Recovery System
12. 
High aggregate throughput for streaming large files

13. Supports replication and locality features
14. 
Designed to work with systems with vary large file (files with size in TB) and few in number.
15. 
Provides streaming access to file system data. It is specifically good for write once read many kind of files (for example Log files).