Recently i had a thought… Most of my machines are sitting redundant and have upto 4 drives in each… without unscrewing every single one of out of my rack… i want to utilise all of that space into one giant zpool using ZFS.
Imagine combining the drive space resources of 10 computers into 1 giant drive? see where i’m going with this now?
So my idea is to make the drives in each machine available to the “ZFS Master” (the solaris box running the ZFS pool) via iSCSI which is a sort of “offer your drives at a block level over ethernet” protocol… then add them all into a giant zpool… the advantages of this are:
- Utilising all of my hardware
- iSCSI can work over WAN so i could use boxes i have in other cities
- Have each Lun “individual computer + drives” power up via WOL (wake on lan) initiated by the ZFS Master
- Greater level of redundancy possible.
- Backup “ZFS Master” possible
- Everything connected via either Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel.
So imagine.. a rack full of computers with hard drives in them… at the bottom is a more powerful computer running solaris which mounts the hdd’s of every single other computer and adds them into the zpool… then advertises this zpool over AFP / SMB to computers in my house…
Yet another way to make a α size tb system out of old free components that could possibly outperform a £20,000 solution! =) I’ll post all of the results of my testing after the break in a few days 
P.S. This idea is without considering performance as that is something i can work out later & thanks bda for your advice
