Author Archive

There is a new file distributed file system in the staging area of the 2.6.30 kernel called POHMELFS. Sporting better performance than classic NFS, it’s definitely worth a look.

Ramdisks can offer a level of performance that is simply amazing. More than just a tool for benchmarking, there are new devices that utilize ramdisks for a bit of the ultra-performance.

FS-Cache along with CacheFS is now in the 2.6.30 kernel and can be used for local caching of AFS and NFS.

Who knew that compression could be so useful in file systems? SquashFS, typically used for embedded systems, can be a great fit for laptops, desktops and, yes, even servers.

The 2.6.30 kernel is chock full of next-gen file systems. One such example is NILFS, a new log-structured file system that dramatically improves write performance.

Need details on your file system’s data? FS_scan allows you dig deep into your storage, giving you the ability to perform trend analysis on the results.

The vast of amount of data being stored in this day and age, naturally leads to files sitting unused for longer and longer periods of time. A new app, agedu, can quickly tell you what data on your filesystem is lying fallow.

The founder of btrfs talks about features, terabyte raid arrays and comparisons with ZFS.

ZFS may be locked into the Solaris operating system but “Butter FS” is on the horizon and it’s boasting more features and better performance.

Jeff Layton talks with Theodore Ts’o about getting the best performance out of your file system, painless migration and the work still to do.

Destined to become the default file system for the more popular Linux distributions, ext4 is out of experimental mode and gearing up for production environments. Here’s what you need to know.

Silence the struggle around cluster software stack configuration. Caos NSA is a distribution that focuses on making things simple, easy to install and upgrade, and easy to manage.

NFS frees you from proprietary file systems and, coupled with Infiniband, is the only standard file system that can be used for high-peroformance distributed processing.

While strace is often used for troubleshooting and debugging, you can also use strace to get started on examining the I/O pattern of your serial codes.

In the last installment of our Parallel Platters series, Jeff Layton looks at the next generation of parallel file systems: Object Based File Systems.

Getting the most out of your cluster is always important. But how exactly is that done? Do you really need to dissect your code and analyze every instruction to get optimal performance? Do you need to build custom kernels? Not necessarily. By testing some basic assumptions, you may be able to eke ten-node performance out of an eight-node cluster. Here’s how.