If you want is just SIOS (Single IO Space) then a PVFS2 setup with multiple dataservers would be the way to go. As long as you do not care for concurrent writes to the same data then PVFS2 would be the easist and cheapes solution to go. You can even setup simple stripe so your writes will be distributed (round rubin manner) amoung the avalible data server. Note however that parallel file systems such as PVFS2 are distinguised from the more general term: distributed file systems, in that they are designed for multiple clients accessing the filesystem data in parallel from a pool of machines - so if what you really want is just to have one machine access a large storage pool then the lack of meta data cahcing in PVFS2 may prove to high a price to accept in which case you may want to give GFS a try.
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If you want is just SIOS (Single IO Space) then a PVFS2 setup with multiple dataservers would be the way to go. As long as you do not care for concurrent writes to the same data then PVFS2 would be the easist and cheapes solution to go. You can even setup simple stripe so your writes will be distributed (round rubin manner) amoung the avalible data server. Note however that parallel file systems such as PVFS2 are distinguised from the more general term: distributed file systems, in that they are designed for multiple clients accessing the filesystem data in parallel from a pool of machines - so if what you really want is just to have one machine access a large storage pool then the lack of meta data cahcing in PVFS2 may prove to high a price to accept in which case you may want to give GFS a try.