XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as of June 2014, XFS is supported by most Linux distributions; Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses it as default filesystem.
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the technology and systems involved, or a specialized device built for such functionality.
In computing, a file system or filesystem is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way a paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a "file". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system."
Storage Resource Broker (SRB) is data grid management computer software used in computational science research projects. SRB is a logical distributed file system based on a client-server architecture which presents users with a single global logical namespace or file hierarchy. Essentially, the software enables a user to use a single mechanism to work with multiple data sources.
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a software interface for Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a bridge to the actual kernel interfaces.
Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster. Lustre file system software is available under the GNU General Public License and provides high performance file systems for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site systems. Since June 2005, Lustre has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, and more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, including the world's No. 1 ranked TOP500 supercomputer in November 2022, Frontier, as well as previous top supercomputers such as Fugaku, Titan and Sequoia.
In Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a device mapper framework that provides logical volume management for the Linux kernel. Most modern Linux distributions are LVM-aware to the point of being able to have their root file systems on a logical volume.
IBM Spectrum Protect is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect family.
GPFS is high-performance clustered file system software developed by IBM. It can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes, or a combination of these. It is used by many of the world's largest commercial companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on the Top 500 List. For example, it is the filesystem of the Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was the #1 fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2019 TOP500 list of supercomputers. Summit is a 200 Petaflops system composed of more than 9,000 POWER9 processors and 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs. The storage filesystem called Alpine has 250 PB of storage using Spectrum Scale on IBM ESS storage hardware, capable of approximately 2.5TB/s of sequential I/O and 2.2TB/s of random I/O.
Mounting is a process by which a computer's operating system makes files and directories on a storage device available for users to access via the computer's file system.
Filesystem-level encryption, often called file-based encryption, FBE, or file/folder encryption, is a form of disk encryption where individual files or directories are encrypted by the file system itself.
Ceph is an open-source software-defined storage platform that implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster and provides 3-in-1 interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage. Ceph aims primarily for completely distributed operation without a single point of failure, scalability to the exabyte level, and to be freely available. Since version 12, Ceph does not rely on other filesystems and can directly manage HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can completely self reliantly expose a POSIX filesystem.
StorNext File System (SNFS), colloquially referred to as StorNext is a shared disk file system made by Quantum Corporation. StorNext enables multiple Windows, Linux and Apple workstations to access shared block storage over a Fibre Channel network. With the StorNext file system installed, these computers can read and write to the same storage volume at the same time enabling what is known as a "file-locking SAN." StorNext is used in environments where large files must be shared, and accessed simultaneously by users without network delays, or where a file must be available for access by multiple readers starting at different times. Common use cases include multiple video editor environments in feature film, television and general video post production.
Content storage management (CSM) is a technique for the evolution of traditional media archive technology used by media companies and content owners to store and protect valuable file-based media assets. CSM solutions focus on active management of content and media assets regardless of format, type and source, interfaces between proprietary content source/destination devices and any format and type of commodity IT centric storage technology. These digital media files most often contain video but in rarer cases may be still pictures or sound. A CSM system may be directed manually but is more often directed by upper-level systems, which may include media asset management (MAM), automation, or traffic.
The Active Archive Alliance is a trade association that promotes a method of tiered storage. This method provides users access to data across a virtual file system that migrates data between multiple storage systems and media types including solid-state drive/flash, hard disk drives, magnetic tape, optical disk, and cloud. The result of an active archive implementation is that data can be stored on the most appropriate media type for the given retention and restoration requirements of that data. This allows less time sensitive or infrequently accessed data to be stored on less expensive media and eliminates the need for an administrator to manually migrate data between storage systems. Additionally, since storage systems such as tape libraries have low power consumption, the operational expense of storing data in an active archive is significantly reduced.
The Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) is a SNIA standard that specifies a protocol for self-provisioning, administering and accessing cloud storage.
Data defined storage is a marketing term for managing, protecting, and realizing value from data by combining application, information and storage tiers. This is achieved through a process of combination, where users, applications and devices gain access to a repository of captured metadata that allows organizations to access, query and manipulate the critical components of the data to transform it into information, while providing a flexible and scalable platform for storage of the underlying data. The technology abstracts the data entirely from the storage, allowing full transparent access to users.
Object storage is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. Each object typically includes the data itself, a variable amount of metadata, and a globally unique identifier. Object storage can be implemented at multiple levels, including the device level, the system level, and the interface level. In each case, object storage seeks to enable capabilities not addressed by other storage architectures, like interfaces that are directly programmable by the application, a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware, and data-management functions like data replication and data distribution at object-level granularity.
Scality is a company based in San Francisco, California that develops software-defined object storage. RING is the company's commercial product. Scality RING software deploys on industry-standard servers to store objects and files. Scality also offers a number of open source tools called Zenko, including Zenko CloudServer, compatible with the Amazon S3 interface.
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, the project is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
