Arbitrary Storage Expansion On *nix?

[ViRGE]

While visiting Wikipedia today I stumbled across the page for Microsoft's new Windows Home Server OS and one of the features in particular caught my eye. Microsoft calls is "Windows Home Server Drive Extender", which redundancy features aside offers "arbitrary storage expansion" that allows folders to span multiple drives and for drives to be added to the cluster arbitrarily. Basically as far as I can tell it allows a folder-level interface with the computer with the OS figuring out which drives things will go on in the background.

Now the reason I ask this is because while this is the first time I've seen such a feature on Windows, it seems strikingly similar to something else I've seen on a *nix system of some sort. It reminds me of JBOD, but I don't recall JBOD allowing arbitrary addition and removal of drives from the cluster. Does anyone know if *nix does indeed have something like MS's software?

 

[sciencewhiz]

LVM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...Volume_Manager_(Linux)

 

[ViRGE]

Aha! Thanks.🙂

 

[Brazen]

yeah, this has been a fundamental part of linux distros for years.