You're reading from Architecture and Design of the Linux Storage Stack Gain a deep understanding of the Linux storage landscape and its well-coordinated layers

Product type Paperback

Published in Jul 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781837639960

Length 246 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

Linux

Concepts

Design

Author (1):

Muhammad Umer

Preface

1. Part 1: Diving into the Virtual Filesystem

2. Chapter 1: Where It All Starts From – The Virtual Filesystem FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Explaining the Data Structures in a VFS

4. Chapter 3: Exploring the Actual Filesystems Under the VFS

5. Part 2: Navigating Through the Block Layer

6. Chapter 4: Understanding the Block Layer, Block Devices, and Data Structures

7. Chapter 5: Understanding the Block Layer, Multi-Queue, and Device Mapper

8. Chapter 6: Understanding I/O Handling and Scheduling in the Block Layer

9. Part 3: Descending into the Physical Layer

10. Chapter 7: The SCSI Subsystem

11. Chapter 8: Illustrating the Layout of Physical Media

12. Part 4: Analyzing and Troubleshooting Storage Performance

13. Chapter 9: Analyzing Physical Storage Performance

14. Chapter 10: Analyzing Filesystems and the Block Layer

15. Chapter 11: Tuning the I/O Stack

16. Index

17. Other Books You May Enjoy

Understanding storage topology

Most enterprise environments usually contain a mix of the following types of storage.

Direct Attached Storage (DAS): This is the most common type of storage and is attached directly to a system, such as the hard drive in your laptop. Since data center environments need to have a certain level of redundancy at every layer, the directly attached storage in enterprise servers consists of several disks that are grouped in a RAID configuration to improve performance and data protection.
Fibre Channel storage area network: This is a block-level storage protocol that makes use of fibre channel technology and allows servers to access storage devices. It offers extremely high performance and low response times compared to traditional DAS and is used to run mission-critical applications. It is also far more expensive than other options, as it requires specialized hardware, such as fibre channel adapters, fibre channel switches, and storage arrays.

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