Summary

If you have survived to the end of this chapter and are still hanging in with me, congrats, we made it! Storage is a big deal when it comes to systems administration and likely no other area that you manage will you be able to bring as much value to your organization.

We have covered storage basics building on the concepts of block device interfaces, abstraction techniques, filesystems and their interfaces, and used these concepts to investigate multi-device redundancy and how it can be used to build complex and robust data storage, and how storage access across devices can be handled to meet any potential need. My goal here has been to give you the knowledge necessary to think carefully on your own about your storage needs for any given workload, and an understanding of availability technologies and how you can apply them to meet those goals most effectively.

Never again should you see storage as a magic black box or a daunting task that you dread to tackle. Instead...