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lecture: The evolution of storage on Linux

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Linux and Open Source Software have always played a crucial role in data centers to provide storage in various ways. In this talk, Lenz will give an overview of how storage on Linux has evolved over the years, from local file systems to scalable file systems, logical volume managers and cluster file systems to today's modern file systems and distributed, parallel and fault-tolerant file systems.

Linux and Open Source Software have truly become critical pieces of infrastructure in today's data centers. Especially when it comes to managing and providing storage for other systems, the options are seemingly endless.

This talk attempts to give an overview of how storage on Linux evolved over the years. It will cover well-established concepts like local file systems, logical volume managers and the usual suspects of how these local file systems are made available to clients over the network (e.g. SMB, NFS).

We'll also discuss options to provide redundancy or scalability, introducing technologies like DRBD or cluster file systems like OCFS2 or GFS2.

But the functionality and feature set of local file systems has improved significantly over the years as well; Btrfs and ZFS on Linux will be introduced in this context and how they differ from traditional file systems.

And finally, the talk will outline some of today's storage requirements and challenges and how Linux and Open Source Software continue to play a key role in addressing these, via distributed, parallel and fault-tolerant file systems like Ceph, Gluster or Lustre.