storage question

[mechew]

Can ANYONE point me in the right direction on how to use storage on multiple servers as a single cluster?

I thought storage cluster was for that but, after much googling, and even more help from here, I don't think that achieves my goal.

My goal is to have multiple servers share a file system, to act as somewhat of a network raid, so if node-A goes down the files are available on other nodes, and hopefully so when the capacity of the nodes are reached I can add nodes to expand the "cluster".

I have no idea if my terminology is correct but I'd appreciate ANY feedback.

[HROAdmin26]

Google: linux distributed storage

Ceph

[Mudgen]

I've done it with an iscsi target server with ocfs2 layered onto the iscsi presentations. But if the target server goes down, no storage. To make it server independent, you'd probably need a higher end NAS or SAN, which is a server itself. Real HA calls for a SAN and servers with multiple network or fiber controllers and multiple network/fiber paths between them.

[Mudgen]

Re-read your post. What I said wasn't really what you asked for. You could try setting up multiple servers as iscsi target AND client, then software RAID1 presentations from two servers together and layer ocfs2 or another cluster filesystem on top of the md device, but I bet that would be finicky as all get out.

[nplusplus]

You could try setting up multiple AoE "targets" in a raid array from a given host or set of hosts on which to lay down a global file system (GFS).

[LiuLantao]

MFS(moose fs) is easy to setup such cluster ( than others like gfs/ceiph).

[Lakshmipathi]

another option would be glusterfs Gluster | Cloud Computing & Storage

disclosure - I work with glusterfs team :P