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Matt Cruikshank
Asked: 2009-10-27 20:15:06 +0800 CST

Is there something (free) like ZFS or HadoopFS or GFS for Windows?

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At work, we've got a bunch of boxes with free HD space. I'd like to run something like ZFS on those machines, making a large virtual file system available to all of the users. In my mind, it would map as a drive letter Z:, or maybe a UNC \\zfs\, and it would have redundant backup of chunks of data across the network so that if one computer goes down, it minimizes the chance of losing files.

I see CXFS, EMC Celera HighRoad, Melio FS, SAN-FS, StorNext File System...

What are people using today? Especially if it's FREE!

EDIT: One idea is to run FreeNAS inside a Sun VirtualBox, and use ZFS - but it looks to me like the ZFS Pools don't work across computers...? Also, running virtual boxes is less than ideal.

windows filesystems distributed-computing

4 Answers

  1. What about Windows Distributed File System? That should allow you to create one drive that is in reality a mixture of multiple partitions across different disks/servers

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  2. Plan 9 from Bell Labs?

    I asked a similar question on ServerFault recently: Is there a way to do something like LVM over NFS?.

    Solutions suggested there were Lustre and GlusterFS.

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  3. Best Answer

    AFS might work, but it's still more centralized than you're likely to want to deal with. Read more about it at http://www.openafs.org/windows.html.

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  4. What you are asking for reminds me of Wuala (Google Talk video), except to be run in-house and not via the web. In the talk some people mentioned other technologies.

    I too love ZFS and was waiting for MS to make Windows compatible with it, clone it or come out with their own (something like zNTFS).

    EDITED: I found some software I tried a long time ago. It isn't a way to store files like a file system, but it is a distributed backup program. The program is called Vembu StoreGrid Backup Software. I'll keep looking for something that is more file system like.

    EDITED: xFS shows promise, but looks to be research.

    The only thing better than using unutilized space on the network is using ZFS on it.

    Good luck.

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