The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is designed to store and process large (terabytes) data sets. For example, a large production cluster may have 14 PB of disk space and store 60 million files.

However, storing a large number of small files in HDFS is inefficient. A file is generally considered to be "small" when its size is substantially less than the HDFS block size, which is 256 MB by default in HDP. Files and blocks are name objects in HDFS, meaning that they occupy namespace (space on the NameNode). The namespace capacity of the system is therefore limited by the physical memory of the NameNode.

When there are many small files stored in the system, these small files occupy a large portion of the namespace. As a consequence, the disk space is underutilized because of the namespace limitation. In one real-world example, a production cluster had 57 million files less than 256 MB in size, with each of these files taking up one block on the NameNode. These small files used up 95% of the namespace but occupied only 30% of the cluster disk space.

Hadoop Archives (HAR) can be used to address the namespace limitations associated with storing many small files. HAR packs a number of small files into large files so that the original files can be accessed transparently (without expanding the files).

HAR increases the scalability of the system by reducing the namespace usage and decreasing the operation load in the NameNode. This improvement is orthogonal to memory optimization in the NameNode and distributing namespace management across multiple NameNodes.

Hadoop Archive is also compatible with MapReduce — it allows parallel access to the original files by MapReduce jobs.