A Distributed Filesystem for Spare Storage

摘要

Having access to large quantities of storage space has always been a problem. Traditionally, large storage capacity has been expensive, using dedicated storage systems (NAS), or more complex networked storage (SAN). In many cases these solutions are overkill both in price and in features. Many small offices and research labs with limited budget have computers with unused disk space that could be used as shared storage.A distributed filesystem can take advantage of the storage space of several computers to provide a larger storage. For a small office or lab this filesystem would have to provide easy integration into the infrastructure and reasonable scalability.In this work we propose a filesystem that provides access to a large storage using the unused space in a network of workstations.