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

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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

Solution 3:

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.

Solution 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.