Distributed network RAID

[Joachim Schrod]

Jason wrote:
> couple of options in easiest to most difficult order.
> 
> if don't mind having access to a filesystem on only one node at a time,
> just use NFS to mount the filesystem.
> 
> rsync.  Run it every minute between the two hosts.

This is impossible in practice for any decently-sized filesystem.
rsync needs too long to scan the filesystems and hogs too much CPU 
power.

His best bet are probably cluster file systems, as you mentioned. 
My experience is from HPC clusters; and I can say that the only 
really stable ones are IBM's GPFS and Lustre. Oh yes, and don't use 
Lustre if you need file locking. GFS has not been sufficiently 
stable in our setups -- but then, this was with a few dozen file 
server nodes in a cluster of several hundred compute nodes. Maybe 
it's stable enough with just two home systems.

In any case, this won't be a plug-and-play experience.

	Joachim

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Joachim Schrod				Email: jschrod at acm.org
Roedermark, Germany