There's a company called Cleversafe.(com|org) that makes a product that uses dispersed storage. So in one scenario, you split a block of data up into 8 chunks and store them on separate servers. Only 5 of those servers are needed to reconstruct the data. It has better reliability than RAID and needs fewer disks.
You can either access the data over http as files, or it can be a block store accessible with iSCSI.
They have a commercial product (a colleague of mine is a reseller, I can introduce you if you want), and also an open source version if you want to build the servers yourself.
You can either access the data over http as files, or it can be a block store accessible with iSCSI.
They have a commercial product (a colleague of mine is a reseller, I can introduce you if you want), and also an open source version if you want to build the servers yourself.