Distributed Filesystem

Hi,

I'd like to use the unused space on harddisks of some linux and solaris
machines here around.

The best solution for me would be a server managing several real volumes as
one logical volume. These real volumes would correspond to partitions or
files on the machines which are offered to the server.

The server would also take some redundancy into account. Quasi like a RAID
but with the disks on different computers.

The Home directories I move onto the logical (distributed) volume where they
are mounted by the clients as hitherto by autofs+NFS.

Is this a reasonable solution?

Are there any filesystems and tools to make this solution work?

Thanks for answers,
/Christian

Christian Kier wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to use the unused space on harddisks of some linux and solaris
> machines here around.
>
> The best solution for me would be a server managing several real volumes as
> one logical volume. These real volumes would correspond to partitions or
> files on the machines which are offered to the server.
>
> The server would also take some redundancy into account. Quasi like a RAID
> but with the disks on different computers.
>
> The Home directories I move onto the logical (distributed) volume where they
> are mounted by the clients as hitherto by autofs+NFS.
>
> Is this a reasonable solution?
>
> Are there any filesystems and tools to make this solution work?
>
> Thanks for answers,
> /Christian
You have a two primary choices that I can think of:

1) iscsi and lvm - iscsi allows you to connect via IP to a remote scsi
device as though it were locally attached to your scsi bus. lvm allows
you to create software raid devices. Using these two items in
conjunction should allow you to gan all your drives together as 1 big
device. I've not tried this myself, but it seems pretty straightforward.

2) AFS - the AFS file system allows you to take many systems and use
them as file servers in one global namespace. It allows you to make
several machines act as though they were effectively one big hard drive.

I've set up AFS systems before, and there is a significant learning
curve associated with it, but once you get the hang of it its pretty
stable and robust.

HTH
Neil

--
Neil Horman
Red Hat, Inc., http://people.redhat.com/nhorman
gpg keyid: 1024D / 0x92A74FA1, http://www.keyserver.net

"Christian Kier" <nospam@irgendwann.org> wrote in message
news:br6umb$84r$1@post.student.mu-luebeck.de...
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to use the unused space on harddisks of some linux and solaris
> machines here around.
>
> The best solution for me would be a server managing several real volumes
as
> one logical volume. These real volumes would correspond to partitions or
> files on the machines which are offered to the server.
>
> The server would also take some redundancy into account. Quasi like a RAID
> but with the disks on different computers.
>
> The Home directories I move onto the logical (distributed) volume where
they
> are mounted by the clients as hitherto by autofs+NFS.
>
> Is this a reasonable solution?
>
> Are there any filesystems and tools to make this solution work?
>
> Thanks for answers,
> /Christian

For the Linux boxen, there be Lustre.
See: http://www.clusterfs.com

Enjoy,
Mangled&Munged

Mangled&Munged wrote:
> "Christian Kier" <nospam@irgendwann.org> wrote in message
> news:br6umb$84r$1@post.student.mu-luebeck.de...
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'd like to use the unused space on harddisks of some linux and solaris
>>machines here around.
>>
>>The best solution for me would be a server managing several real volumes
>
> as
>
>>one logical volume. These real volumes would correspond to partitions or
>>files on the machines which are offered to the server.
>>
>>The server would also take some redundancy into account. Quasi like a RAID
>>but with the disks on different computers.
>>
>>The Home directories I move onto the logical (distributed) volume where
>
> they
>
>>are mounted by the clients as hitherto by autofs+NFS.
>>
>>Is this a reasonable solution?
>>
>>Are there any filesystems and tools to make this solution work?
>>
>>Thanks for answers,
>>/Christian
>
>
> For the Linux boxen, there be Lustre.
> See: http://www.clusterfs.com
>
> Enjoy,
> Mangled&Munged
>
>
Yeah, thats a really cool filesystem. I think it takes a _bunch_ of
machines to do anything really worthwhile though.

--
Neil Horman
Red Hat, Inc., http://people.redhat.com/nhorman
gpg keyid: 1024D / 0x92A74FA1, http://www.keyserver.net