Storage

NVMe over Fabrics Support Coming to the Linux 4.8 Kernel

The Flash Memory Summit recently wrapped up its conferences in Santa Clara, California, and only one type of Flash technology stole the show: NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeF). From the many presentations and company announcements, it was obvious NVMeF was the topic that most interested the attendees.

SUSE Enterprise Storage

The conundrum for many enterprise-level businesses is that the demand for data storage is significantly outpacing the shrinking price for storage. The upshot for many is that budgets for storage are growing fast

ZFS: Finding Its Way to a Linux Near You?

It seems like only yesterday that I read Jeff Bonwick's blog entry "ZFS: The Last Word in Filesystems". It was Halloween of 2005 that ZFS was fully integrated into Sun Microsystem's Solaris, and the filesystem was very well received. For the readers not familiar with ZFS, it is a combined all-purpose filesystem and volume manager.

BitTorrentSync: Dropbox for Nerds

It's not really fair to compare Dropbox directly with BitTorrentSync. First of all, my title implies Dropbox is somehow inferior. To be honest, I haven't found anything that works as smoothly as Dropbox when it comes to sync reliability and ease of installation. That said, although it has incredible strengths, it also has a few shortcomings.

High-Availability Storage with HA-LVM

In recent years, there has been a trend in which data centers have been opting for commodity hardware and software over proprietary solutions. Why shouldn't they? It offers extremely low costs and the flexibility to build an ecosystem the way it is preferred. The only limitation is the extent of the administrator's imagination.

Many Drives, One Folder

RAID is awesome, and LVM is incredibly powerful, but they add a layer of complexity to the underlying hard drives. Yes, that complexity comes with many benefits, but if you just want to spread your files across multiple storage locations, there's a much easier way.

Solid-State Drives: Get One Already!

I've been building computers since the 1990s, so I've seen a lot of new technologies work their way into the mainstream. Most were the steady, incremental improvements predicted by Moore's law, but others were game-changers, innovations that really rocketed performance forward in a surprising way.

Advanced Hard Drive Caching Techniques

With the introduction of the solid-state Flash drive, performance came to the forefront for data storage technologies. Prior to that, software developers and server administrators needed to devise methods for which they could increase I/O throughput to storage, most of which resulted in low capacity caching to random access memory (RAM) or a RAM drive.

Return to Solid State

Three years ago, I first reviewed an SSD (solid-state drive) under Linux. At the time, I had an ultra-portable laptop with a 4200rpm hard drive that really bogged down the performance on what was otherwise a pretty snappy little machine.