2025-09-28 –, D1
This talk attempts to sum up the past, present, and possibly future state of the art when a highly available networked storage system is needed.
On FreeBSD with a lack of an up to date port of Ceph options are fewer than in penguin land, but they still exist. Also just maybe Ceph is not the best contender, anyway.
Apparently there's a new kid in town - Garage [1] by French hosting service provider Deuxfleurs. With a current and maintained FreeBSD port, it looks like the most promising option today.
I'll give a historical overview with implementation details for each alternative discussed, ending up with a working Garage cluster deployed with Ansible.
Patrick M. Hausen, born in 1968, developed an interest in all things Unix and networking in general in the late 80s. Having worked on various commercial implementations and looking for an operating system that would be more capable than Minix for actual daily use at home he found out about FreeBSD in 1993.
He's been using, hacking, advocating and occasionally cursing FreeBSD ever since.
In 1997 he joined punkt.de GmbH and has been responsible for network and data centre operations up to this day.
With his colleagues he designed and built the FreeBSD jail and ZFS based hosting platform known as "proServer".