what is the best way to use free space on several boxes?

[Mike Carlson]

On 12/09/2010 09:20 AM, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:14:12 +0200 Zeus V Panchenko<zeus at ibs.dn.ua>   wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> we have several FreeBSD 8-STABLE boxes, each has 2x500GB HDD in gmirror
>> UFS dedicated
>>
>> but really it's used less than 30% each box ...
>>
>> so, advice please, what is the best/correct/right way to use the free
>> space on the boxes? nfs? zfs? iscsi?
>>
>> the aim is to have storage place ...
> This is probably more "researchy" than you want and this is
> probably more suited to a much larger number of nodes but how
> about some sort of a distributed hash table filesystem? Hash
> a block address and map it to N different nodes.  That way
> you can add and remove boxes without having to reconfigure.
> When a block is initially written, its `address' is computed
> from its contents.  One thing you have to worry about is that
> the amount of available storage can change dynamically.
>
> Lots of useful information in the wikipedia entry for this.
>
> Even more researchy: even if you move such disks arround to
> different nodes, or lose some disk blocks, the remaining data
> on such disks can be reattached. A truly resilient storage
> system.
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I had played around with MooseFS, which is available in the ports tree, 
in a small test environment. I would recommend looking at the project 
and seeing if that would suite your needs.

http://www.moosefs.org/

Mike C