Creating and Managing Single-Instance Filesystems
Without data, there is no reason for a system to exist, and with that thought, the data has to live somewhere. In this chapter, we will cover the two most popular filesystems used to manage data that is local to the server: B-Tree File System (Btrfs, pronounced Butter F S) and eXtended File System (XFS, pronounced X F S).
These are single-instance filesystems, which are basically filesystems that are only mounted on a single server at any one time. There are also multi-instance filesystems that are mounted on multiple systems at the same time. Common examples are Oracle Clustered File System version 2 (OCFS2) and Global File System 2 (GFS2). All of these examples use shared block storage for the underlying storage.
Additionally, there is Ceph, which is not an acronym, but instead a reference to cephalopod. This is because Ceph is a distributed architecture that stores data on all nodes of a Ceph cluster. This allows Ceph to offer...