Hot buttered storage

This is one of those cases when I briefly think I’d like to know how to program…

I work in a department with roughly 150 computers that use networked accounts, which means that user data is not kept on each individual computer, but rather on a single server. This results in there only being about 20GB of used hard drive space on each computer, which leaves, conservatively, around 40GB of free space on each machine.

In total, that means we’re essentially wasting at least 6000GB of space, or 6TB.

That is a ton of data. To give you some idea, our central server itself only has 1TB of storage, which is more than enough for all the data in the entire department.

So, it would be cool if there were some client/server-type software that could link up all that available space and create a “virtual server” that appeared to have the total capacity of all the available drive space in the whole department. To a user it would appear just like any other server, but underneath it would be a huge decentralized storage area, which would be immune to the problems inherent in having a single point of failure. At most you would lose one chunk or node of data, and you could easily avoid that by building in redundancy, similar to a RAID setup.

If there’s such a thing out there, I’ve never heard of it, although it does bear a resemblance to P2P file sharing.

Money waiting to be made, if you ask me.

I’d be happy to let any enterprising young developer out there use this idea in exchange for a modest cut of the profit.

Modest.

And no, you’re not allowed to give it away