Figure 1 is an example of a 2x2x2 HDFA configuration: two HDFs, each spanning two nodes, and each node containing two constituent volumes. In this example, each client has a 50% chance of having direct access to the hot file. Two of the four clients have east-west traffic. Importantly, there are now two HDFs, which means two distinct caches of the hot file. There are now two CPUs/volume affinities servicing access to the hot file.

After you decide how dense you want to make your HDFs, you must make another design decision if you will be accessing the HDFs with NFS with inter-SVM HDFAs and intra-SVM HDFAs.