What is meant by "streaming data access" in HDFS?

Posted by Van Gale on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Van Gale
Published on 2009-07-14T10:13:54Z Indexed on 2010/05/28 0:22 UTC
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filesystems

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streaming

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hadoop

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hdfs

According to the HDFS Architecture page HDFS was designed for "streaming data access". I'm not sure what that means exactly, but would guess it means an operation like seek is either disabled or has sub-optimal performance. Would this be correct?

I'm interested in using HDFS for storing audio/video files that need to be streamed to browser clients. Most of the streams will be start to finish, but some could have a high number of seeks.

Maybe there is another file system that could do this better?

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