Author Archives

I'm the CEO & co-founder of OS NEXUS, a storage appliance software company with a focus on scale-out storage management. We do a lot of hardware and software storage technology integration on Linux with our QuantaStor Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform this blog is our way to share some thoughts and insights on these technologies and where we're headed with SDS.

• The Easy Button for Ceph Deployments

  By stevenu on April 1, 2016 • ( 1 )

  

  UPDATE 11/28/2017 With the release of QuantaStor v4.4 this month we just posted a YouTube video that goes over the setup of a Ceph cluster in just 10 minutes using QuantaStor SDS. ORIGINAL ARTICLE Ceph is amazing storage tech. The… Read More ›

• Hardware RAID is dead, long live hardware RAID.

  By stevenu on March 3, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  UPDATE 11/28/2017 Although the benefits outlined in this article mostly still hold true in 2017- we’ve been going the route of using SATA/SAS HBAs connected directly to the drives for Ceph deployments.  The main benefits of doing so are performance… Read More ›

• Tracking File Usage in Real-time with inotify

  By stevenu on December 5, 2015 • ( 0 )

  Way back in August 2005 a really interesting file tracking feature was added to the Linux kernel (v2.6.13) and given all the interest today in data governance and security I thought it’d be nice to put a spotlight on it,… Read More ›

• Defining Software Defined Storage (SDS), what it is, and isn’t.

  By stevenu on November 27, 2013 • ( 0 )

  UPDATE 11/28/2017 Over the last 4 years we’ve seen strong adoption of SDS with a growth rate over 100% YoY at OSNEXUS.   Today we see our storage grid technology in QuantaStor being a key differentiator for customers with hyper-scale deployments,… Read More ›

• Integrating ZFS

  By stevenu on July 9, 2013 • ( 4 )

  

  UPDATE 11/28/2017 Since I wrote this article years ago many things have changed so here’s a quick update.  Today 90% of our deployments are ZFS based and we only use XFS within our Ceph deployments for OSDs.  Even that use… Read More ›

• Btrfs & ZFS, the good, the bad, and some differences.

  By stevenu on April 24, 2013 • ( 2 )

  UPDATE 11/28/2017 It’s been 5 years since I wrote this article and a refresh is due.  In short, at OSNEXUS we’re no closer to adoption of BTRFS and in the intervening years we’ve put our efforts into making ZFS on… Read More ›

• Understanding FC (and FCoE) fabric configuration in 5 minutes or less.

  By stevenu on March 20, 2012 • ( 34 )

  

  Forget what you’ve heard, it isn’t that hard.  Assuming you’re setting up a basic fibre channel SAN for VMware or a cluster filesystem like Apple’s Xsan the process is pretty straight-forward. For detail on FCoE there’s a great paper on… Read More ›

• Managing hybrid SSD Caching w/ OS NEXUS QuantaStor

  By stevenu on February 17, 2012 • ( 0 )

  

  SSD caching is an important performance technology that can boost the IOPS performance of many workloads like virtualization, databases, and web servers by an order of magnitude or more.  SSD caching of HDD arrays has gone mainstream with new technologies… Read More ›

• Hybrid SSD storage & LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro v2.0

  By stevenu on February 16, 2012 • ( 2 )

  

  UPDATE 11/28/2017 Over the last 6 years we’ve seen LSI be acquired by Avago which was then acquired by Broadcom but unfortunately we’ve not seen many innovations in hardware RAID.  I’d been hoping to see things like bit-rot correction and… Read More ›