Competencies: Infrastructure > Storage
Storage
Body of Knowledge
| Topic | Description | Relevance | Career Tracks |
|---|---|---|---|
Filesystem Fundamentals |
ext4, xfs, btrfs, filesystem selection, formatting, mount options, fsck, filesystem limits. |
Critical |
Systems Administrator, Storage Engineer |
LVM |
Physical volumes, volume groups, logical volumes, thin provisioning, snapshots, extending/reducing. |
Critical |
Systems Administrator, Storage Engineer |
btrfs |
Copy-on-write, subvolumes, snapshots, compression, scrubbing, RAID, send/receive. |
High |
Systems Administrator, Linux Power User |
ZFS |
Pools, datasets, snapshots, clones, compression, dedup, scrub, replication, ARC/L2ARC. |
High |
Storage Engineer, Systems Administrator |
Disk Encryption (LUKS) |
LUKS1/2, cryptsetup, key slots, header backup, detached headers, auto-unlock, dm-crypt. |
High |
Systems Administrator, Security Engineer |
NFS |
NFSv3/v4, exports, mount options, Kerberos auth, autofs, NFS security, performance tuning. |
High |
Systems Administrator, Storage Engineer |
iSCSI |
Initiator/target, LUNs, IQN, multipath, targetcli, enterprise SAN integration. |
Medium |
Storage Engineer, Virtualization Admin |
Ceph |
RADOS, RBD, CephFS, object storage, CRUSH map, OSD, MON, MGR, PG, cluster management. |
Medium |
Storage Engineer, Cloud Engineer |
Backup Fundamentals |
Backup types (full, incremental, differential), 3-2-1 rule, RPO/RTO, verification, encryption. |
Critical |
Systems Administrator, SRE |
Backup Tools |
rsync, Borg, Restic, rclone, Syncthing, cloud backup, bare-metal recovery. |
High |
Systems Administrator, DevOps |
NAS Administration |
Synology/QNAP, RAID levels, SMB/NFS shares, replication, snapshot scheduling. |
Medium |
Systems Administrator, Homelab |
Container Storage |
Longhorn, Rook-Ceph, OpenEBS, CSI drivers, persistent volumes for Kubernetes. |
High |
Platform Engineer, Storage Engineer |
Personal Status
| Topic | Level | Evidence | Active Projects | Gaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
btrfs / LVM |
Advanced |
btrfs on Arch workstation — snapshots, subvolumes, compression; LVM on RHEL lab VMs — thin provisioning, snapshot-based backups |
No ZFS, no Stratis, no enterprise SAN management |
|
Disk Encryption / LUKS |
Advanced |
LUKS2 full-disk encryption on all workstations; understand key slots, header backup, detached headers; integrated with systemd-cryptsetup |
No TPM-backed unlock, no clevis/tang network decryption |
|
NFS / Storage |
Advanced |
NFS exports from Synology NAS to lab VMs; understand NFS v3/v4, export options, mount automation via fstab and autofs |
No iSCSI, no Ceph, no distributed storage |
|
Backup Strategy |
Advanced |
btrfs snapshots, Synology NAS replication, age-encrypted config backups in git; multi-tier backup approach |
No Borg/Restic, no offsite cloud backup, no tested disaster recovery runbook |