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| nickgs1@gmail.com 2006-01-30, 5:48 pm |
| Hello all.
My name is Nick Selvaggio. I am a computer science student at NYIT.
This semester I am taking my semester project and am mulling over
idea's for the project. I have an idea which involves a SAN type
architecture. I wanted to bounce the idea off of some people before
trying to implement.
The idea is that many small corporate networks have a vast amount of
free storage sitting on the desktop machines themselves. My idea
involves pooling these resources together using Active Directory
technology (etc) to present this free space as a single storage
location for employees to use like a "public drive" .... I did a small
amount of research on the topic and it looks like it may be possible.
Does anyone have any idea's about the subject? Is it currently
implemented?
Thanks.
Nick Selvaggio
www.nickgs.com
nickgs.blogspot.com
nickgs1@gmail.com
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| bk66md@gmail.com 2006-01-30, 5:48 pm |
| I remember reading something similiar - although the unused desktop
space was to be used for backup(magnetic disk storge).
I would be interested in following your progress on this.
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| Faeandar 2006-01-30, 8:46 pm |
| On 30 Jan 2006 08:03:13 -0800, nickgs1@gmail.com wrote:
>Hello all.
>
>My name is Nick Selvaggio. I am a computer science student at NYIT.
>This semester I am taking my semester project and am mulling over
>idea's for the project. I have an idea which involves a SAN type
>architecture. I wanted to bounce the idea off of some people before
>trying to implement.
>
>The idea is that many small corporate networks have a vast amount of
>free storage sitting on the desktop machines themselves. My idea
>involves pooling these resources together using Active Directory
>technology (etc) to present this free space as a single storage
>location for employees to use like a "public drive" .... I did a small
>amount of research on the topic and it looks like it may be possible.
>Does anyone have any idea's about the subject? Is it currently
>implemented?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Nick Selvaggio
>www.nickgs.com
>nickgs.blogspot.com
>nickgs1@gmail.com
There are a couple of products out there today that do this. Acopia
is the one that comes to mind immediately since it works without a
client and will do both CIFS and NFS. However, since you mentioned
small networks that implies low budget too, and Acopia is more
enterprise focused.
Though small network does not necessarily define low budget of course.
Doing this in AD I think is tantamount to a failing grade for your
project. AD can barely replicate it's own data, let alone the large
amount of data you're discussing. DFS is a prime example; Domain
based roots have a link limit of 5k. This is based on the average
size of a link and how much replication is required of AD.
~F
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| nickgs1@gmail.com 2006-01-31, 6:40 pm |
| Thank you for all of your feedback so far! I figure I have the end of
the week to make a definite decision on a project. If I decide to go
forward with this idea I will be sure to keep this thread updated.
In terms of how you would implement this I was thinking of using the AD
to just query the free space on the network attached machines and then
use some other protocol to collect, collate, and transport the data. I
am not to familar with SAN arch. which is why this project interests me
so. Is iSCSI the protocol which would enable this type of block level
access to "normal" IDE attached storage within the PC's? From the brief
research I have done so far it looks like iSCSI is just a protocol to
transport SCSI commands over TCP. From what this is telling me is that
PC's will not be able to process the SCSI commands my client program
would recieve. Maybe I can convert the SCSI commands into a usable
construct on the client machines...... or maybe I am completly off
track.... 
Thanks again!
Nick Selvaggio
www.nickgs.com
nickgs.blogspot.com
nick...@gmail.com
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| eyemole 2006-01-31, 6:40 pm |
| Hi nickgs1,
Your idea to learn SAN and SAN internals is really very good.
But could you please tell why there is a need of such concept. Space
residing on Desktop machines is private space to that user. He may not
be interested in sharing his space to global shared space. In which
situation this concept can be implemented.
eyemole
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| nickgs1@gmail.com 2006-01-31, 6:40 pm |
| Hello eyemole,
The idea came about while taking a look at the network which I
administer which contains 45 PC's all mostly used for terminal access
to an iSeries server and basic Microsoft Office documents. All PC's are
hooked into a domain and all emails reside on our Exchange server.
After looking at the space which is available on the users machines it
hit me .... "hey why I can't we use this space for something? " I
understand in different (more demanding) environments ( such as
engineers and designers )users need all the space and processing power
they can grab but for smaller less demanding environments (such as
mine) this space is left idle for years.
The more I think about it the complexity grows and grows in my mind.
This would have to handle minimizing network traffic on the local lan,
be fault tolerate (RAID etc), and be completely transparent to the
users. That StorGrid product looks interesting. I am going to DL a
trial and see how that works.
Thanks.
Nick Selvaggio
www.nickgs.com
nickgs.blogspot.com
nick...@gmail.com
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| Sébastien Mouren 2006-02-12, 7:46 am |
| Using iSCSI allows you to present storage units you want to access to as a
iSCSI target and device as iSCSI initiator.
Have a look at products from this company and their SDK too:
http://www.rocketdivision.com/
-Sebastien Mouren
<nickgs1@gmail.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
1138718231.599603.292530@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Thank you for all of your feedback so far! I figure I have the end of
> the week to make a definite decision on a project. If I decide to go
> forward with this idea I will be sure to keep this thread updated.
>
> In terms of how you would implement this I was thinking of using the AD
> to just query the free space on the network attached machines and then
> use some other protocol to collect, collate, and transport the data. I
> am not to familar with SAN arch. which is why this project interests me
> so. Is iSCSI the protocol which would enable this type of block level
> access to "normal" IDE attached storage within the PC's? From the brief
> research I have done so far it looks like iSCSI is just a protocol to
> transport SCSI commands over TCP. From what this is telling me is that
> PC's will not be able to process the SCSI commands my client program
> would recieve. Maybe I can convert the SCSI commands into a usable
> construct on the client machines...... or maybe I am completly off
> track....
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Nick Selvaggio
> www.nickgs.com
> nickgs.blogspot.com
> nick...@gmail.com
>
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|
| Nick,
Also consider that you would most likely need to make a filesystem on
the storage that is available. Once you did something like that, that
free storage on the users system is no longer soley avalable to that
user. In theory at least. Also, you also need protection from stupid
user downloding virus on his disk, and transferring it to your storage.
I think you project need to have more focus on the requirements side,
and less on the implimentation, otherwise, you will go down a path, and
learn some of these things during implimentation (when they should be
uderstood at the time of design)
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|
| Nick,
Also consider that you would most likely need to make a filesystem on
the storage that is available. Once you did something like that, that
free storage on the users system is no longer soley avalable to that
user. In theory at least. Also, you also need protection from stupid
user downloding virus on his disk, and transferring it to your storage.
I think you project need to have more focus on the requirements side,
and less on the implimentation, otherwise, you will go down a path, and
learn some of these things during implimentation (when they should be
uderstood at the time of design)
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| btw, good concept for small size company.
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