Virtual NAS software for utilizing spare drive capacity on LAN computers.

[mvrx]

I run a small lan network for a school. We have about 35 computers in the lab that each have an average of 300GB of unused space on their hard drives.

I like to run alot of incremental redundant backups on campus machines with as long of history/versioning as possible.

I'm hoping to find some sort of virtualization software that allows me to create a storage file on each machine (preferrably pre-allocated size) that a central machine manages. Perhaps providing a virtual fake X: drive that accepts data from my backup programs and migrates it out into the spare capacity on all these machines. I'm not all that worried about it being super reliable.

Anyone know of anything like this that exists? Haven't found anything googling.

Thanks.

 

[JackMDS]

Take a look at Acronis TrueImage 2009.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16832200008

 

[mvrx]

Sorry, but I must be missing something. In what way does True Image create a virtual spanned stoage drive across 35 computers's spare storage space?

 

[Nothinman]

It's an interesting idea but I don't think anything like it exists. The best you could probably do is repartition the drives so that the free space is a separate volume, export it via something like iSCSI, mount all of the new volumes on the management machine an combine them with software RAID, LVM, etc and then share the resulting volume. If you could find an iSCSI daemon that would let you export a file as a disk instead of a disk then you could skip the repartitioning part.

 

[doan]

If that worked, all of the PCs would have to be on all the time.

Originally posted by: Nothinman
It's an interesting idea but I don't think anything like it exists. The best you could probably do is repartition the drives so that the free space is a separate volume, export it via something like iSCSI, mount all of the new volumes on the management machine an combine them with software RAID, LVM, etc and then share the resulting volume. If you could find an iSCSI daemon that would let you export a file as a disk instead of a disk then you could skip the repartitioning part.

 

[Nothinman]

If that worked, all of the PCs would have to be on all the time.

Yea, to work otherwise one would need something a lot smarter to distribute the data in a way that the missing drives could be rebuilt from what's available.