Distributed Filesystem.

Discussion in 'Software' started by NightWalker, Jul 25, 2008.

  1. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    A while ago I heard about a software app (can't remember the name) that would allow you to use the spare space on the hard drives in workstations as a big network storage solution. We have 1000s of PCs in the enterprise. They all have at least an 80GB hard drive, and only about 10GB is used. All that free space! The SANs are filling up and it would be nice to utilise the free storage on the workstations in a big redundant distributed file system.

    Anyone know of an app or have experience with implementing distributed storage in this way?
     
    Certifications: A+, Network+, MCP, MCSA:M 2003, ITIL v3 Foundation
  2. Fergal1982

    Fergal1982 Petabyte Poster

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    I wouldnt trust something like that with a ten foot barge-pole personally. It would be completely dependant upon the user(s) leaving their machine on.

    There are two things to that: Firstly, the moment a single user turns off their machine, the data is unavailable. likewise, if the machine dies, the data is gone. Secondly, because the machines would need to be on all the time, your power consumption will be pretty high. That costs money. In one year, you would probably spend enough on electricity powering those machines, to buy yourself a hefty server anyway.

    Its simply more cost effective (I would think) to buy a server for more space.

    Or, if you want to, you could rip all those 80G drives out of the user machines, and replace them with 20 gig drives, then take all the 80's and dump them into a several machines (multiple drives per machine) and use those as servers. That would likely still cost less.
     
    Certifications: ITIL Foundation; MCTS: Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Administration
    WIP: None at present
  3. NightWalker

    NightWalker Gigabyte Poster

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    Heavily used live data would remain on the FAP servers, the DFS would be for archive data and mainly static content, which we have loads of. With 1000s of PCs the data could be striped across many drives in duplicate so the loss of any workstations would not affect the integrity of the data stored. Users won't need to access data when they are not in the office so PCs would be powered down as usual at night. I am sure there is a product out there that does this....
     
    Certifications: A+, Network+, MCP, MCSA:M 2003, ITIL v3 Foundation
  4. zcapr17

    zcapr17 Nibble Poster

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    Any of the common opensource P2P applications could probably be adapted to suit this purpose.

    It might be possible to use Microsoft Groove like this, although I doubt it's the application you are thinking of.
     
    Certifications: MCSE:2K3 MCTS:Vista VCPv3 ITILv3 Sec+ L+
    WIP: MCITP Enterprise Admin 2008, CCA

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