CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cloudstoragedisk
Alexander Goida
Alexander Goida

Reputation: 364

How should I build an on-premise storage with unlimited size?

Basically, I want to build on-premise storage which supports an unlimited size (personal interest). I would like to avoid integration with any of the cloud vendors. It should support abstraction over disks storage so that, for example, a database may have potentially infinite size. Which directions should I investigate?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 116

Answers (1)

root
root

Reputation: 6038

If you can use Linux, you can look into LVM. LVM allows you to dynamically add storage in various topologies.

If you need a filesystem on top of that volume, you probably want ext4. Once you've extended the storage underlying ext4, ext4 can painlessly gobble up the extra space and add it as free space to itself.

If you need redundancy (RAID), you can build your LVM volumes on top of md. You can also build an md device on top of LVM volumes, although that's not as broadly useful.

For completeness, if you wanted to add storage from different machines, those machines could export iSCSI volumes to the machine where you set up LVM.

If those machines could only export a filesystem e.g. NFS, then you could create a big file on the filesystem, make it into a loop device, and use that as a volume.

And lastly, you could also just mount different NFS volumes at different points in the mount tree. It's not very useful in extending storage to something like a DB, but it is useful in extending storage as you add new applications.

For all the networking options, my tip would be: don't use network storage for the volumes that contain the root filesystem of the machine.

Upvotes: 1

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