The paradigm can be flipped now for these distributed storage systems. The blocks of a filesystem can now be objects, replicated or erasure-coded - like Ceph r

The paradigm can be flipped now for these distributed storage systems. The blocks of a filesystem can now be objects, replicated or erasure-coded - like Ceph running filesystems on top of its low-level object storage protocol, which is done on raw disks, not a filesystem. This can't be done for something like Minio just running on your filesystem, but if you're building the storage system from the ground up it can. We will see more and more of these products appearing. Vast Data is another interesting one. Global deduplication and compression for your data, with an S3, block, or NFS interface. Storing differential backups for thousands or millions of VMs? You'll only store the data from base Ubuntu image once.