Metadata Consistency Model of GFS

Metadata

The manager node stores all of the metadata in memory and serves user requests from there for good performance. Some part of the metadata is stored persistently on the hard disk of the manager node and also replicated on remote machines, while some metadata is not, as shown in the following illustration. (The part of the metadata that is not persistently stored can be rebuilt if needed. At times, such data is called a soft state.)