HDFS provides a distributed file system that integrates seamlessly with Hadoop, offering features like fault tolerance, load balancing, and easy addition or removal of nodes. It is well suited for problems involving hundreds of millions or billions of rows of data where the full functionality of an RDBMS is not required, as long as sufficient hardware is available. The history of HDFS includes its origins in Google's BigTable paper in 2006 and its evolution as a Hadoop sub-project in 2008 before becoming a top-level Apache project in 2010.