I have a couple of different servers around the house, and a lot of storage on each of these machines. I also have a couple of dedicated servers, and some VMs on these boxes... Most of the boxes and VMs run Windows, but i have a Mac and a couple of Linux boxes.
I am looking for some sort of Cross Platform Blob Storage system that can be installed on a machine easily, given an location to store files on, and told an amount of disk space to use... self organizing would be handy, but if i need to tell it how to find other nodes in the cluster, so be it... something like S3, but self hosted...
I am just wondering, is there something with an easy enough API (or even SMB/NFS access) that will allow me to upload a file (or object as it where) to a location, and let it replicate around a network? The Open Stack Storage system looks good, but it doesn't seem to support Windows as a Server, only as a Client... Any recomendations?
why would you want to use Windows as the server when you're at least comfortable enough with linux to have a few linux boxes? makes no sense to me.
Openstack's Swift http://swift.openstack.org/ would seem to fit your described needs.
"Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store. Organizations can use Swift to store lots of data efficiently, safely, and cheaply."
NOTE: Swift is NOT a file system. It's an object store. Completely different thing.
I did a training course on Swift a few weeks ago, as we're using it at work in an openstack cloud deployment. it does what it says on the tin. You will need at least 3 machines to run it on. and preferably a second NIC in each box (swift nodes chatter endlessly with each other).
Eucalyptus is an open-source project that aims to replicate services provided by AWS, including their S3 object store.