Overview

System Storage Manager is a comprehensive unified command-line tool for Linux storage management that wraps a broad range of underlying technologies into a consistent, task-oriented interface.

Modern Linux storage environments increasingly mix Device Mapper, LVM, software RAID, advanced filesystems, encryption, and more. Each technology has its own commands, flags, and idiosyncrasies, making multi-layer storage management error-prone and difficult to automate reliably. SSM was created to abstract this complexity behind a single, consistent CLI surface so common storage operations can be expressed once and delegated to the appropriate backend.

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What SSM Does

SSM doesn’t replace underlying storage technologies. Instead, it provides a uniform abstraction over them, detecting and managing pools, volumes, filesystems, snapshots, migrations, and mounts without forcing the user to master each individual tool.

From SSM’s own docs:

“System Storage Manager provides an easy to use command line interface to manage your storage using various technologies like LVM, btrfs, encrypted volumes and more.”

It does this through a core abstraction layer and pluggable backends that implement operations like create, resize, list, and snapshot for each storage stack.

Supported Layers and Backends

SSM’s design recognizes that storage in Linux isn’t flat — it’s a stack of interdependent layers. Its architecture exposes these as:

  • Pools – groups of devices (e.g., LVM volume groups, btrfs filesystem devices)
  • Volumes – units carved from pools (logical volumes, subvolumes, encrypted devices)
  • Snapshots – point-in-time copies where supported
  • Devices – physical devices contributing to pools

Backends

SSM supports several backend implementations:

  • LVM — maps pools → LVM volume groups, volumes → logical volumes, snapshots via LVM snapshotting logic.
  • Btrfs — maps pools → btrfs filesystems and volumes → subvolumes, taking advantage of btrfs’s integrated volume and snapshot features.
  • Crypt — manages encrypted volumes using dm-crypt/cryptsetup (without pooling).
  • MD & Multipath — currently read-only enumeration support, with future management extensions planned.

This backend architecture lets SSM offer a uniform command set regardless of the stack underneath.

Command Surface

SSM exposes a rich CLI with commands like:

  • ssm list — show detected devices, volumes, pools, filesystems, and snapshots
  • ssm create — provision a new volume (optionally with filesystem and RAID)
  • ssm resize — grow or shrink a volume + filesystem
  • ssm snapshot — take a snapshot (when supported)
  • ssm mount — mount a volume with a single command
  • ssm migrate — move data between devices
  • ssm check — filesystem consistency checks

The interface gives a consistent experience so scripts and admins can learn one tool, not many.

Why SSM Was Valuable

SSM’s value proposition centers on reducing cognitive load in storage automation and operations:

  • Declarative storage intent Rather than memorizing a sequence of commands for each subsystem, users express intent (e.g., “create this volume with these characteristics”).

  • Topology awareness SSM inspects the existing layout and only performs the required actions.

  • Safe automation It encodes correct operational sequences, reducing the risk of mistakes.

Project Status

Although SSM was actively developed with regression tests and multiple backends, it is no longer under active development and was later handed off to a colleague. Note that in ecosystem distributions like Red Hat, SSM has been marked deprecated and removed in later releases (e.g., RHEL 9).

Learn More

Full documentation, usage examples, and downloads are on the project site: https://system-storage-manager.github.io/