A virtual file system is arranged between a physical file system and an analytics platform comprising a plurality of compute nodes, and is configured to control movement of data between the analytics platform and the physical file system. For example, the virtual file system may be configured to present to the analytics platform a software application programming interface (API) through which the analytics platform accesses data stored in the physical file system. The analytics platform illustratively comprises a unified analytics platform that is configurable to support both database analytics and map-reduce analytics. In some embodiments, the physical file system comprises one or more of a Lustre file system, a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and a General Parallel File System (GPFS), and the virtual file system comprises a parallel log-structured file system (PLFS).