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.

Google builds one Colossus file system per cluster in a data center. Many of these clusters are powerful enough to manage multiple exabytes of storage, with two file systems, in particular ...

Network Appliance’s acquisition of Spinnaker is the precursor to the mainstream adoption of distributed file systems in 2004 and 2005 as an alternative to single-file system architectures.At ...

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.