As Linux continues to expand into enterprise environments, the file systems that underpin enterprise workloads become increasingly important. File systems provide the structured storage that serves critical applications and workloads, from databases to analytics. With the rise of new storage technologies like NVMe and persistent memory, we are seeing new Linux file systems emerge to take advantage of these hardware advances. Here we explore three of the most promising next-generation file systems slated for adoption in Enterprise Linux.
Stratis - A New Take on Local Storage
One new Linux file system option targeted towards Enterprise Linux is Stratis. Developed by Red Hat, Stratis represents a fundamentally new approach for local storage management in Linux. Traditionally, administrators had to manually configure block devices, file systems, volume management and other components to provide storage for applications. Stratis abstracts much of this complexity away through the use of storage “pools”.
Admins can create Stratis pools from sets of block devices, allowing the Stratis subsystem to handle the volumes, file systems and other components programmatically. File systems can be thinly provisioned from the pool as needed, without pre-allocation. Features like snapshotting, quotas and monitoring come built-in. Red Hat has positioned Stratis as the next-generation replacement for LVM in Enterprise Linux. It forms the core storage technology in Red Hat's Spectrum Scale software-defined storage platform. Expect Stratis adoption to rapidly rise in mission-critical Enterprise Linux environments.
XFS - Battle-Tested for Modern Workloads
While Stratis takes a revolutionary approach, XFS represents evolutionary enhancements to a battle-tested Linux file system. Developed by SGI in the mid-90s for high performance I/O workloads, XFS brings robust journaling capabilities, high degrees of parallelism and scalability. In Linux, XFS has deep integration with LVM volumes and is widely deployed in large-scale block storage environments.
In the past, XFS had reputation for being CPU-intensive. But continued work by the XFS development community has optimized performance. New XFS features like reflink for lightweight copy-on-write snapshots also make the file system suitable for modern container and cloud workloads. Emerging NVMe and persistent memory hardware continues to alleviate XFS bottlenecks seen on legacy spinning media. Expect XFS to remain the workhorse Linux file system for high-throughput, low-latency block storage well into the future.
Btrfs - The Future Linux File System?
First included in Linux in 2007, Btrfs (B-tree file system, pronounced “Butter FS”) represents the most modern Linux file system design. Btrfs brings together advanced features like snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, checksums, compression and subvolumes under one umbrella. It also introduces new capabilities like its flexible RAID profiles, allowing admins to tailor redundancy schemes on a per-volume basis.
For years the promise of Btrfs was tempered by questions around stability and data integrity. But recent versions of the Linux kernel and distributions like SUSE have aggressively productionalized Btrfs capabilities. Features like transparent zlib compression can realize significant storage savings with minimal performance impact. Checksumming helps ensure data remains intact, while flexible RAID handles error recovery cleanly at the file system level.
Looking ahead, Btrfs is positioned to take best advantage Linux's newest storage hardware. Its B-tree data structures and lockless writes architecture are designed for next-gen NVMe and persistent memory technologies. Development also continues on advanced features like deduplication, swap files and free space caching to further boost efficiency. If current maturity trends continue, Btrfs seems destined to become the ultimate data storage engine across desktop, server and cloud environments in the Enterprise Linux world.
The Road Ahead
While Stratis, XFS and Btrfs aim to raise the bar for Enterprise Linux file system capabilities, they represent just a few promising options emerging in the space. Other file systems like OpenZFS and BeeGFS parallel file system bring powerful capabilities while targeting more specific high-performance computing use cases. Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVMs) continue to radically transform Linux file system implementations in virtualization environments.
It’s an exciting time in the ecosystem, with data storage playing an increasingly pivotal role across IT landscapes. As hardware continues advancing by leaps and bounds, the onus is on next-generation file systems to harness all that performance while streamlining storage management. By leveraging new Linux file systems like Startis, XFS and Btrfs, Enterprise organizations position themselves to unlock the true potential of their data infrastructure both now and into the future.