[aklug] Re: Combined network storage space

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Christopher Howard wrote:

> I had a question... mostly out of curiosity. Is there a way that you
> can take multiple PCs and combine them (in a non-literal sense) to
> create one large network share? (Say, an smb, nfs, or ftp share.) I
> mean, not by buying some huge enterprise server system, but just using
> some 32 bit PCs, and some specialized Linux distro?
> I saw some references on the Internet to SANs and storage clusters on
> the Internet, but it tended to be above my head, not having a
> professional background in networking (beyond the simple stuff that most
> IT people know).

I thought AFS or GFS would do this. It's been awhile since I looked at it
(I think AFS is ancient though). It'd be cool if Sun's ZFS had this built
in, but I have no idea if that might be the case.

If you really wanted to get dirty, you might be able to go beyond a
grid-style NAS and into SAN by playing with iSCSI and Linux or FreeBSD,
but I don't know if this would satisfy the grid aspect you reference.

Mike
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Received on Fri Aug 15 20:55:54 2008