[PLUG-ANNOUNCE] TONIGHT: May PLUG Meeting: Block Storage Device Life Cycles

[Michael Dexter]

Portland Linux/Unix Group General Meeting Announcement

Who: Michael Dexter
What: Block Storage Device Life Cycles
Where: PSU, 1930 SW 4th Ave. Room FAB 86-01 (Lower Level)
When: Thursday, May 7th, 2015 at 7pm
Why: The pursuit of technology freedom
Stream: TBD

Block storage has joined electricity as one of the fundamental 
technologies on which we are completely and irrevocably dependent. The 
two technologies are in fact becoming inextricable now that computers 
control virtually every electrical system from the distribution grids on 
up, and computers themselves are completely dependent on electricity to 
operate. Both technologies have undergone countless innovations yet 
still operate largely on their original basic principles. While high in 
capacity, fast and affordable, the modern hardware block storage device 
or “hard disk” operates on the same principles as the original 1956 IBM 
350 disk storage unit and most solid-state alternatives emulate hard 
disks. Beginning with the Berkeley Fast File System, the BSD family of 
operating systems has played a key role in the evolution of general 
purpose block storage and continues this innovation with technologies 
like virtual block storage devices, GEOM, UFS2, ZFS, GELI, HAST, GEOM 
Journaling, FUSE, tmpfs and the NAND Flash framework. This paper will 
survey the available block device options in the FreeBSD operating 
system and explore their practical uses in modern storage architectures.

FreeBSD is unique in that it provides the reference platform for the 
Unix File System and is now a tier one Zettabyte File System or ZFS 
platform. The 10.0 release of FreeBSD is particularly unique in that it 
includes in-kernel iSCSI network block device sharing, the NAND Flash 
framework, a FUSE implementation and the bhyve hypervisor which can 
leverage and help test most FreeBSD storage technologies. The FreeBSD 
ports collection also includes support for guest file systems such as 
ext2 and NTFS, which provide new opportunities to "round trip" virtual 
and physical machines using bhyve and tools such as the iBFT iSCSI boot 
framework.

Finally, while an unprecedented block storage toolkit can enable 
extensive experimentation, there are pragmatic issues surrounding 
production storage architectures. This paper will touch on real world 
block storage solutions built with FreeBSD and its derivatives. These 
derivatives include the FreeNAS storage appliance, which provides 
networked block and file storage to a myriad of Unix and non-Unix 
clients. Pragmatic issues surrounding verifiable data integrity include: 
understanding and embracing ZFS behavior and limits, observing disk and 
partition health in addition to data integrity, understanding the 
implications of file naming, maintaining backups and restoring desired 
data in a timely manner.

Calagator Page: http://calagator.org/events/1250467959

Many will head to the Lucky Lab at 1945 NW Quimby St. after the meeting.

Rideshares Available

PLUG Page with information about all PLUG events: http://pdxlinux.org/
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PLUG is open to everyone and does not tolerate abusive behavior on its 
mailing lists or at its meetings.

See you there!

Michael Dexter
PLUG Volunteer