Disk Storage (accross network)
 

Hi,

I have 10 old Linux boxes each with about 10GB of disk space. Is there a way I can combine them in one transparent way in order to have one virtual 100GB drive (that they all can use)? I can use NFS to mount directories on each other but that only allows the directory max size to be the size of the disk.

I would like to pseudo RAID all the disks on the network together. Hence one machine could go down (if I used RAID-5) and everything would still work fine. I know this isn't something that is currently done (at least not in the main stream) but I have read articles (and even designed a rudimentary program that does something like this - but nothing I would ever use for production use). There are some PhD dissertations on this as well, Chord being the name of one such project. [http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/chord/]

Any thoughts?

Take a look at nbd "Network Block Device":
http://nbd.sourceforge.net/

hey i am not sure ,but does nbd alow multuiple read/write(concurrent access) to the nodes

or is this possible by any other technique apart from those sharable expensive disk arrays