Liquidity is a term you are more likely to hear on a financial news channel than at a technology trade show.  As an investment-related term, liquidity refers the amount of capital available to banks and businesses and to how readily it can be used.  Assets that can be converted quickly to cash (preferably with minimal loss in value) in order to meet immediate and short term obligations are considered “liquid.” When it comes to data storage, liquid storage assets can be viewed as those that can be allocated to virtually any workload at any time without compromising performance, cost-efficiency/manageability, resiliency, or scalability.  High liquidity storage supports any workload operating under any OS, hypervisor, or container technology, accessed via any protocol (network file systems, object storage, block network, etc.), without sacrificing data protection, capacity scaling, or performance optimization.

ReFS (Resilient File System – is a Microsoft file system, which ensures data integrity by means of resiliency to corruption (irrespective of software or hardware failures), increases data availability and scales to large data sets across various workloads. Its data protection feature is represented by the FileIntegrity option, which is responsible for file scanning and repair processes.

This is a short overview of Microsoft Resilient File System, or ReFS. It introduces the subject and gives a short insight into its main characteristics and theoretical use. It is a part of a series of posts dedicated to ReFS and is, basically, an introduction to the practical posts. All the experiments that show how ReFS really performs, are also listed in the blog. ReFS seems to be a great replacement for the NTFS and its resilience is most convenient for cases, when data loss is critically unacceptable. The file system cooperates with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct in order to perform automatic corruption repairs, without any attention of the user.

Log-Structured File System is obviously effective, but not for everyone. As the “benefits vs. drawbacks” list shows, Log-Structuring is oriented on virtualization workload with lots of random writes, where it performs like a marvel. It won’t work out as a common file system for everyday tasks. Check out this overview and see what LSFS is all about.