Here’s a good read on the GFS (Google File System).

GFS (Google File System) is a distributed file system. A Distributed File System is one that supports sharing of files and resources, which are stored persistently over the network. GFS is implemented by Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung. When I read their original paper on this file system, all questions I asked above were answered respectively. This is what they had to say:

“While sharing many of the same goals as previous distributed .le systems, our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and technological environment, both current and anticipated that reflect a marked departure from some earlier file system assumptions.