How to utilize spare workstation drive space for server storage/backup

So, given the fact that you can only get hard drives of about 160GB now for the cheapest price, I find i have a ton of extra drive space on workstations spread throughout my office. I'd like to utilize this space as a redundant RAID-like array of some sort for low-priority files and backups.

I have about 100 workstations that need only 40GB of disk space to operate, which leaves about 120GB of spare space which i have partitioned off. I'm wondering if there is some way to use iSCSI or similar to mount those partitions in some kind of RAID-like array. I mean, that's something like 12.5TB of disk storage at my disposal which won't be used by the workstations (they're locked down and don't allow users to fiddle with it).

Also, the workstations are always on, so that's not an issue, but the system should be tolerant of occasional downtime due to reboots for various reasons (Windows, you know).

Are there any off-the-shelf solutions for this? What about open source? I'd rather not roll my own if I don't have to.

My server environment is ESX 3.5 with mostly Windows hosts. SQL Server, etc... workstations are all Windows.

Solution 1:

There are a few P2P backup systems out there. I was just reading about Tahoe, but there are others.

There is also GlusterFS, which can create a big storage pool out of a lot of commodity nodes. It's UNIX only, so to use it you'd have to do something odd, like deploy a virtual linux appliance running on each Windows machine and reshare it from one or two parent servers using Samba to make it look like a windows file server.

Solution 2:

Well, it's certainly not a typical way of doing it, and I really wouldn't suggest it for...well, anything other than an experiment, but you might be able to get OpenAFS to do it.

Solution 3:

OK I cannot help you with the iSCSI RAID solution, but I can help with the iSCSI. I have started using a product called StarWind - Free from www.starwindsoftware.com. That you would install on the workstations to share up the space. Then you would use the Microsoft standard iSCSI initator

Basically it gives you an iSCSI target. It says it only works for Windows 2003, but it might work for Vista or XP.

I have been using the StarWind software for a while and it looks almost too simple to be an enterprise product, but it does a very good job of offering space. I was able to successfully attach an ESX 3i host to to a Starwind iSCSI target which was a Dell GX110 with an IDE drive. Then I was able to install and run Windows 2003 on that LUN

I guess that you would use another piece of software to aggregate all those expose iSCSI luns into a iSCSI RAID.

Solution 4:

Vembu Storegrid supports this functionality.

Flud is an upcoming option for this as well, and they have a list of similar systems.