It also came out at an interesting time, because everyone was trying to push data-to-redundancy ratios to their limits. Since storage was so expensive back then, storing multiple copies of data made little sense when looking at it from a data storage view, even if the speeds were much better

Then Google dropped their MapReduce paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Which quite literally paved the way for modern data processing, and works extremely well with the Google Filesystem architecture