Sistina Software was a US company that focused on storage solutions designed around a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

platform. It originated in the University of Minnesota. Their three primary offerings were

Global File System In computing, the Global File System 2 or GFS2 is a shared-disk file system for Linux computer clusters. GFS2 allows all members of a cluster to have direct concurrent access to the same shared block storage, in contrast to distributed file s ...

(GFS),

logical volume management In computer storage, logical volume management or LVM provides a method of allocating space on mass-storage devices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes to store volumes. In particular, a volume manager can concatenate, ...

(LVM) and

device mapper The device mapper is a framework provided by the Linux kernel for mapping physical block devices onto higher-level ''virtual block devices''. It forms the foundation of the logical volume manager (LVM), software RAIDs and dm-crypt disk encrypti ...

(DM). Sistina Software was acquired by Red Hat in December, 2003 for $31 million in stock. After acquisition GFS was merged into Red Hat Cluster Suite and open sourced.

GFS

GFS is a cluster file system on Linux that allows servers to transparently access a single file system on a

storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from se ...

(SAN). Its highlights are performance and reliability (

journaling filesystem A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a "journal", which is usually a circular log. In the event ...

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

through parallelism, etc.).

LVM

LVM has become a part of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

. It is a subsystem which allows arbitrary physical storage to be recognized as a virtual disk device. The physical storage can be remote, or it can even consist of multiple physical devices, but LVM abstracts those distinctions away from the operating system user. LVM also provides services for backing up data.

References

{{Red Hat Red Hat