Sistina Software

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Sistina Software was a US company that focused on storage solutions designed around a Linux platform. It originated in the University of Minnesota. [1]

Contents

Their three primary offerings were Global File System (GFS), logical volume management (LVM) and device mapper (DM). [2]

Sistina Software was acquired by Red Hat in December, 2003 for $31 million in stock. [3] After acquisition GFS was merged into Red Hat Cluster Suite and open sourced.

GFS

GFS is a cluster file system on Linux that allows servers to transparently access a single file system on a storage area network (SAN). Its highlights are performance and reliability (journaling filesystem, scalability through parallelism, etc.).

LVM

LVM has become a part of the Linux kernel. It is a subsystem which allows arbitrary physical storage to be recognized as a virtual disk device. The physical storage can be remote, or it can even consist of multiple physical devices, but LVM abstracts those distinctions away from the operating system user. LVM also provides services for backing up data.

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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 its default file system.

In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, stripe together or otherwise combine partitions into larger virtual partitions that administrators can re-size or move, potentially without interrupting system use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data striping</span> Data segmentation technique

In computer data storage, data striping is the technique of segmenting logically sequential data, such as a file, so that consecutive segments are stored on different physical storage devices.

In computing, the Global File System 2 (GFS2) is a shared-disk file system for Linux computer clusters. GFS2 allows all members of a cluster to have direct concurrent access to the same shared block storage, in contrast to distributed file systems which distribute data throughout the cluster. GFS2 can also be used as a local file system on a single computer.

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.

The device mapper is a framework provided by the Linux kernel for mapping physical block devices onto higher-level virtual block devices. It forms the foundation of the logical volume manager (LVM), software RAIDs and dm-crypt disk encryption, and offers additional features such as file system snapshots.

In Linux systems, initrd is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, to be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are commonly used to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DRBD</span> Distributed replicated storage system for Linux

DRBD is a distributed replicated storage system for the Linux platform. It mirrors block devices between multiple hosts, functioning transparently to applications on the host systems. This replication can involve any type of block device, such as hard drives, partitions, RAID setups, or logical volumes.

Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) was a flexible, integrated volume management software used to manage storage systems under Linux.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file systems.

The Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) is a disk encryption specification created by Clemens Fruhwirth in 2004 and originally intended for Linux.

The Red Hat Cluster Suite (RHCS) includes software to create a high availability and load balancing cluster. Both can be used on the same system although this use case is unlikely. Both products, the High Availability Add-On and Load Balancer Add-On, are based on open-source community projects. Red Hat Cluster developers contribute code upstream for the community. Computational clustering is not part of cluster suite, but instead provided by Red Hat MRG.

dm-crypt is a transparent block device encryption subsystem in Linux kernel versions 2.6 and later and in DragonFly BSD. It is part of the device mapper (dm) infrastructure, and uses cryptographic routines from the kernel's Crypto API. Unlike its predecessor cryptoloop, dm-crypt was designed to support advanced modes of operation, such as XTS, LRW and ESSIV, in order to avoid watermarking attacks. In addition to that, dm-crypt addresses some reliability problems of cryptoloop.

Btrfs is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager, developed together. It was created by Chris Mason in 2007 for use in Linux, and since November 2013, the file system's on-disk format has been declared stable in the Linux kernel.

Ceph is a free and open-source software-defined storage platform that provides object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. Ceph provides distributed operation without a single point of failure and scalability to the exabyte level. Since version 12 (Luminous), Ceph does not rely on any other conventional filesystem and directly manages HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can expose a POSIX filesystem.

A trim command allows an operating system to inform a solid-state drive (SSD) which blocks of data are no longer considered to be "in use" and therefore can be erased internally.

The most widespread standard for configuring multiple hard disk drives is RAID, which comes in a number of standard configurations and non-standard configurations. Non-RAID drive architectures also exist, and are referred to by acronyms with tongue-in-cheek similarity to RAID:

BeeGFS is a parallel file system developed for high-performance computing. BeeGFS includes a distributed metadata architecture for scalability and flexibility reasons. It specializes in data throughput.

dm-cache is a component of the Linux kernel's device mapper, which is a framework for mapping block devices onto higher-level virtual block devices. It allows one or more fast storage devices, such as flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs), to act as a cache for one or more slower storage devices such as hard disk drives (HDDs); this effectively creates hybrid volumes and provides secondary storage performance improvements.

Stratis is a user-space configuration daemon that configures and monitors existing components from Linux's underlying storage components of logical volume management (LVM) and XFS filesystem via D-Bus.

References

  1. ↑ Hayes, S. A.; O'Keefe, Matthew (September 10, 2001). "An Interview with Matthew O'Keefe of Sistina Software". Linux.com. Retrieved January 26, 2013.
  2. ↑ "Sistina Announces New Version of Logical Volume Manager in Linux Kernel for Robust, Flexible Volume Management". Business Wire. December 9, 2002. Archived from the original on July 14, 2014. Retrieved January 26, 2013.
  3. ↑ Rooney, Paula (December 18, 2003). "Red Hat Buys Linux Storage ISV Sistina for $31 Million". CRN News. UBM Tech. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved January 26, 2013.
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