On Mar 28, 2006, at 9:18 PM, John Falk wrote:
I'm looking for a solution that would provide large amounts of data
storage and would be able to grow exponentially. I am a network
administrator for a school, like most schools right now budgets are
tight and our data storage needs are growing. I am looking to make a
giant raid5 out of retired machines. I was looking at the open-afs
project to create a network data storage cloud. As machines are
retired
they would be added to the data storage cloud and all data would be
split across several machines like raid5. Is this or can this
easily be
implemented using open-afs?
Short answer to a 'long' question ;-) "no".
AFS is a 'file system'. This means it _uses_ disks and it doesn't
provide some.
You can build your 'data cloud' by an AFS cell, but that's one layer
above that (what I think you had in mind).
AFS can provide a complete distributed filesystem, where clients and
users aren't aware of the whole organization of data and servers behind.
It comes with a complete set of management tools for the file system,
authentication (if you want some, but that's a little too old for
some people) authorization and some backup functionality and some
nice supplemental file system goodies.
It's not a networked RAID substitute nor a high availability data
cluster, etc. (I seem to run out of examples of misinterpretations of
a 'distributed filesystem' :-) )
I didn't want to scare you off, and I sincerely hope I haven't, I
just tried to clarify things.
Horst
P.S.: There was another project providing networked software disc
RAIDs, but I don't remember the name.
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