Agreed. I think the post misses out the new file systems supporting the new Linux roll-out. I believe ButterFS is extremely interesting with regards to distributed block storage for example.
By "extremely interesting" do you mean "not distributed at all"?
You can use ButterFS in conjunction with Sheepdog to achieve de-duplification, snapshotting etc. There are a number of choices of combinations but ButterFS is definitely one option.