5

At work, we've got a bunch of boxes with free HD space. I'd like to run something like ZFS on those machines, making a large virtual file system available to all of the users. In my mind, it would map as a drive letter Z:, or maybe a UNC \\zfs\, and it would have redundant backup of chunks of data across the network so that if one computer goes down, it minimizes the chance of losing files.

I see CXFS, EMC Celera HighRoad, Melio FS, SAN-FS, StorNext File System...

What are people using today? Especially if it's FREE!

EDIT: One idea is to run FreeNAS inside a Sun VirtualBox, and use ZFS - but it looks to me like the ZFS Pools don't work across computers...? Also, running virtual boxes is less than ideal.

4 Answers4

7

What about Windows Distributed File System? That should allow you to create one drive that is in reality a mixture of multiple partitions across different disks/servers

user155695
  • 290
2

Plan 9 from Bell Labs?

I asked a similar question on ServerFault recently: Is there a way to do something like LVM over NFS?.

Solutions suggested there were Lustre and GlusterFS.

Community
  • 1
warren
  • 19,297
2

AFS might work, but it's still more centralized than you're likely to want to deal with. Read more about it at http://www.openafs.org/windows.html.

clee
  • 253
1

What you are asking for reminds me of Wuala (Google Talk video), except to be run in-house and not via the web. In the talk some people mentioned other technologies.

I too love ZFS and was waiting for MS to make Windows compatible with it, clone it or come out with their own (something like zNTFS).

EDITED: I found some software I tried a long time ago. It isn't a way to store files like a file system, but it is a distributed backup program. The program is called Vembu StoreGrid Backup Software. I'll keep looking for something that is more file system like.

EDITED: xFS shows promise, but looks to be research.

The only thing better than using unutilized space on the network is using ZFS on it.

Good luck.

Scott McClenning
  • 641