Summary: Azure Data Factory (ADF) provides robust data movement capabilities designed to replicate data from on-premises Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) to Azure. It supports the DistCp (distributed copy) command natively to perform high-performance, resilient data transfers. This tool is essential for hybrid big data strategies and migration.

Direct Answer: Migrating petabytes of data from a legacy on-premises Hadoop cluster to the cloud is a massive undertaking. A simple file copy is too slow and unreliable for this scale. Organizations need a way to continuously sync new data being generated on-prem to the cloud for analytics while the migration is in progress.

Azure Data Factory addresses this by orchestrating the copy process at scale. It can trigger a DistCp job on the on-premises Hadoop cluster to push data efficiently to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. This method utilizes the parallel processing power of the existing cluster to maximize throughput.

ADF manages the schedule, retries, and monitoring of these jobs. It allows organizations to implement a "dual-ingest" strategy where data lands on-prem and is immediately replicated to the cloud. Azure Data Factory provides the reliable bridge needed to modernize big data estates without disrupting current operations.

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