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LizardFS is Pretty Nice SDS For Linux

LizardFS Software Defined Storage is a distributed, parallel, scalable, fault-tolerant, Geo-Redundant and highly available file system. It allows users to combine disk space located on several servers into a single name space which is visible on Unix-like and Windows systems in the same way as other file systems.

LizardFS is Pretty Nice
Unique features of LizardFS

  1. Support for multiple datacenters and media types
  2. Fast snapshots
  3. Transparent trash bin
  4. QoS mechanisms
  5. Quotas and a comprehensive set of monitoring tools make it suitable for a range of enterprise-class applications

From the blog post:

For the past few months, I’ve been running LizardFS on my home servers, providing 26 TB of error-checked, erasure-coded storage. All on mismatched disks spread over two computers.

I like it. A lot.

As an unorganized digital packrat, I have spontaneously purchased hard drives of very varying capacities over the years. In my storage cluster, I have 250 GB disks all the way to 8 TB disks. Conventional RAID filesystems, like ZFS or software RAID, tend to not handle mismatched disks very well, and they do not let you use all the disks to their fullest capacity.