Google File System

Google file system solves google's need to 1) store large volume 2) on commodity hardwares.
Before Google file system (or even now), people usually purchased expensive storage system (NAS, SAN, etc...) to store large volume of data safely. But this is costly, and inefficient in terms of resource utilization, as there are many idle storage space on commodity servers. Google came up with the way to utilize it.

Their design is based on practical reasons. Having single master is a good reason - this is definitely single point of failure, but they chose ease of management and simplicity over robust but complex solution. At least, it is useful enough in their usage pattern.

Also, they have made several trade-off choice to support 1st class customer better - write once read many data. Which implies that many other storage systems should appear to support other needs. BigTable is a good example. This leaves a question - The era of general solution (as database) has gone? Is it way better to devise different system for each need?