That should be doable. I have been performing some tests with a high-performance enterprise NFSv3 storage and Spark and it worked like a charm. I still kept an HDFS filesystem to keep logs and historical data (as a kind of tier-2) and used the high-performance NFS storage for the tier-1 datasets that needed more performance and lower response times. Ironically I found out that this NFS storage solution NFS performed similar or slightly better than HDFS when it comes to massive reads but clearly outperformed HDFS in writes, specially when the jobs had a lot of shuffle and spill to disk. The key thing to use an external and high-performance NFS storage is to make sure all the nodes in the cluster have a persistent mount to the NFS filesystem and all of them use the same mountpoint. When you submit your Spark jobs you just use instead "file:///", for example: "file:///mnt_bigdata/datasets/x". The great questions here are: (1) Is Hortonworks supporting this? (2) Is there any kind of generic NFS integration/deployment/best-practice guide? (3) Is there a procedure to completely move the entire cluster services and resources file dependencies out from HDFS to NFS ? ... View more