years ago I had the idea that all these computers in our school, sitting there using 1/4 or less now of their drivespace, could be turned into a distributed storage array. maybe to run somekind of vast shadowcopy array or storing video feeds from cameras. I envisaged each pc would have a driver than made the diskspace available to the array but invisible to users to the pc. I dont know how you'd make a backup array of many parts function, there would certainly be room for many raid component. It was just a crazy idea, light-years beyond my ability to create. any thoughts?
I had the same idea a while back. Windows does include the facility for creating such a distributed file system. The idea was shot down when I explained it to a colleague who then asked...
What if the file you want is on a PC in Room 10 that hasn't been turned on yet?
yeah it neads to be like that but feature raid capability and better security
I think the problems and complexity arising from this far outweighs the benefits. Its not like disk is especially expensive is it..?
Plus it'll have an impact on your network infrastructure to have many machines running DFS-like around the school
My thoughts exactly - I start sorting ours out on Monday, hopefully. We have a bunch of Windows XP machines (SCL all-in-ones) that we're going to fit second harddrives in. These machines also have a second network card each to avoid network traffic problems - these machines basically have their own dedicated SAN. The idea is to get all of those machines to each share their second harddrive as a network-available block device of some sort, then have a fast file server aggregate those shares into a RAID array which can then be shared back out as a Samba file share.Originally Posted by browolf
The details of how, exactly, we share the harddrives out are a little hazy - I could have sworn I found a Windows XP driver at some point for a block-sharing protocol of some kind, but that's about all I remember about it.
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David Hicks
Last edited by dhicks; 13th February 2009 at 08:36 PM.
It may have been the windows DFS drivers you found (Distributed File System: Frequently Asked Questions)
Otherwise I'd take a look at systems like Gluster (Gluster - Home) for a distributed file system or perhaps Cloudstore (WELCOME TO CLOUDSTORE) - been a while since I deployed one. Most are *NIX based systems I'm afraid and my experiences were all with deploying into *NIX computation cluster environments.
Nope - I definitely found a driver for Windows XP that could share a spare partition from a Windows machine to a Linux server as a block device. I can't remember the name of the driver, or even the protocol used, as I'm on holiday at the moment and not on my work PC to look stuff up.
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David Hicks
Would hate to try and recover any lost data!! Sounds like a crazy idea. If you want loads of disc space, remove the hdds, get USB pens and make the workstations thin client and make a load of file servers.
Bah, now your just being sensible, where is the fun in that I ask you.
If you want to do something fun, use RAM as storage.
That's dynamic RAM not static RAM
Watches as the cleaner unplugs the file server to plug the hoover in
For real fun use the network itself as storage, racetrack memory over utpall fun and games till someone touches a patch lead.
That's the idea of exporting the extra harddrives as block devices, so I can create a RAID array with them. I actually wanted to make a RAID-1 array but mirroring between three drives instead of two, just to be safe, but I don't think mdadm will let me do that. This storage network is intended for storing large video files, nothing else - more important files go on the normal file servers.
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David Hicks
I like that idea. I'm intrigued about this driver you found. how long before you get back!?
Ah - found the ServerFault post I did:
Cluster file systems - Server Fault
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David Hicks
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