Distributed/Clustered file systems?

[Alvin Oga]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> I'm looking for some low-cost alternatives to buying a SAN/NAS, or even 
> a large file server.  I'm about to do
> a tech refresh, buying a dozen new servers and relinquishing our old 
> servers to our testing network. I'm probably
> going to buy an exabyte lto-3 tape library, but instead of the 
> complexity of host-based backup systems, I'd like
> to use the free space on each server (of which there will be quite a 
> bit) to create a couple of large volumes, effectively
> doing RAID over my lan.  The only options that seem to be viable for 
> this kind of setup are PVFS and Lustre.

or network raid  ( drbd.org )
or any "global filesystem" or "distributed fs" ??

- which one to use it the "trick"

>  Does
> anybody have experience with this type of solution, and can recommend 
> one from a stability point of view?

too new to be the primary fs of corp data ... good for secondary backups
to test against other backups  ( 100TB live backups are gonna be fun )

c ya
alvin