Distributed software raid over network
 

I am looking in to if it is possible to create a raid, from some unused drive in workstation that never get turned off, looking to test with 4 machines and 1 controlling box, would like to know if anyone has looked in to this.

Looking to take this in to some thing like a raid 51 solution for redundancy later (with hot swaps)

:twocents:

I believe what you're essentially trying to do would be distributed computing. I would take a look at beowulf clusters. The end result would be that the data is mirrored on the drives, if my memory serves...and you get the benefit of additional computing power from each networked machine.

Here's a link if you're not familiar with it: http://www.beowulf.org/

Other than the above option, I'm not aware of a real-time method to do what it sounds like you are trying to do. A non-real-time solution would be to create NFS shares on the networked machines, and incrementally back the data up on the shares over the network.

Hope this helps.

workstation running linux?
look for DRBD on http://www.drbd.org/
good luck

Thanks dougbourne and Savet
Will looking, buy these workstation are windows so more looking to use there disk space more than any thing but cpu would be a bonus for me.

take a look at
http://www.mosix.org

it's an HPC cluster solution