Distributed File System

["Martyn Wendon" <mailing.lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

Is anybody here using Microsoft's Distributed File System?

With all the talk of storage recently together with my growing needs for
more space for dvds / music / videos / etc, it occured to me that a
somewhat
cheaper option could be to make use of spare capacity across the various
machines around my network, especially as most of them stay on 24/7 anyway.

Obviously this is easy enough to do by simple shares (machine1\videos,
machine2\videos, etc) but managing and locating files is then a bit of a
chore, especially with clients like XBMC.

What would be great I thought would be a way to simply refer to the
"storage
space" as "my_huge_space\videos" (for example), with content
being
seamlessly available from whatever machine it is located on.

After doing a bit of research, it seems that Microsoft's DFS offers exactly
this, with extra bells and whistles such as caching, replication and
fail-over.

So if anybody is using this, or has used it previously, can you give any
thoughts / comments on performance and reliability?


Cheers,

Martyn