Consoldated Network Storage?

bigstupid asks: "Is there anyway to better utilize storage space on your network? I have a home network with about nine permanently attached PCs. A few of these are older PII300 with smaller hard drives (3-10GB). What I want to do is consolidate as much of the network storage as possible. That is: Instead of 2.4GB here, 4.6GB there, 5GB hither, 5BG tither, and 6 GB yon, I would like this storage space to appear to any computer I designate a 'client' to see and use this storage space as one large (in the case above 23GB) volume. I know I can do this within a machine with logical volumes or RAID, but is there a piece of software - client or server side - that will do this on Linux or Windows?"

Comments

iSCSI

[benjamindees]

You might try running RAID over something like iSCSI (if it can be done), and re-exporting that filesystem from a central server.

Imagine this on a beowulf

[Froze]

Before you mod me down, this is serious :-)

I am the admin at our school for a newly installed 32 node linux beowulf. Each node has a spare 20GB partition that is currently doing *nothing*. I would simply love to find a filesystem solution that can handle stripping or mirroring for a nice 32*20/x GB of filespace (where x is the amount of redunancy to be tuned for optimal reliability).

If anyone has the solution, even if it requires work, I am all ears.