Hadoop Distributed File System vs MooseFS

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the primary distributed storage used by Hadoop applications. Its clusters use a NameNode to manage filesystem metadata and DataNodes to store data. HDFS is designed for fault tolerance on commodity hardware and high-throughput streaming access and batch processing, not low latency. It is tuned for files from gigabytes to terabytes, clusters with hundreds of nodes, and tens of millions of files in one instance. Administration includes shell-like commands, NameNode and DataNode web servers, fsck diagnostics, safemode, and a cluster balancer. Its permissions model shares much with POSIX and can optionally use POSIX ACLs; authentication supports simple operating-system identity or Kerberos. Configured encryption protects data at rest and in transit using encryption zones and the Hadoop Key Management Server. WebHDFS provides a REST API, and listed storage integrations include Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Tencent COS. HDFS is free to use under Apache License 2.0, with self-hosted cluster deployment.

MooseFS is distributed storage software that combines data held across multiple servers into one resource. It can be mounted as a POSIX filesystem, used as a block device, or accessed through the C API. Reads and writes run across multiple chunkservers, so adding servers can increase both storage capacity and bandwidth. MooseFS replicates data chunks and restores missing copies after disk or node loss. The Community edition is open source under GPLv2, with one active master and single-parity erasure coding. Personal provides the full Pro feature set for non-commercial use, free up to 20 TiB of used raw space; beyond that, the listed price is €9 as a one-time purchase for each TiB. Pro adds synchronized master failover and support for clusters spanning locations. MooseFS 5 adds cluster-wide authentication. Official packages are offered for Linux distributions, FreeBSD, Raspberry Pi OS, and macOS; macOS requires macFUSE and macOS 12 or later. The native Windows client is included with Pro.