It is a distributed file system used in Google's own datacenters, and it is embedded in the Google Search Appliance, which is as a self-contained search device. It is not available as software only.

The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned ...

Modern systems, such as Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), are primarily designed for large datasets and are often burdened by the metadata overhead when managing vast numbers of small files.

(1) For replication of files across the Internet, see IPFS. (2) A distributed file system is software that keeps track of files stored across multiple servers or networks.