DFS allows administrators to consolidate file shares across multiple servers so users can access files from a single location. It provides benefits like centralized resources management, high accessibility regardless of physical location, fault tolerance through replication, and optimized workload distribution. HDFS is the distributed file system of Hadoop. It has a master/slave architecture with a single NameNode managing the file system namespace and DataNodes storing and retrieving blocks. The NameNode maintains metadata and regulates client access while DataNodes store and serve blocks upon instruction from the NameNode, providing streaming data access at large scale for batch processing workloads.