HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) is an open-source, distributed file system written in Java that is used to store large files across commodity hardware. HDFS distributes data across clusters of servers and provides fault tolerance by replicating data blocks on multiple data nodes. To ensure fault tolerance, HDFS utilizes mechanisms like heartbeat monitoring between the namenode and datanodes, rack awareness for replication, and redundant namenodes for high availability.