Cluster/Load Balancing software that displays multiple hard-drives as one?

Question

Does anyone know of a clustering/load balancing software(free or commercial) that once setup, only requires you to login at one place and all hard drives are mounted together as one?

For example, currently i have 1 server which i access by going to www.myurl.com/cpanel and one hard-drive is displayed and i upload all my website files there.

If I had 100 linux or windows servers connected together using load balancers and wanted to run them as a cluster, is there software where i can just go to www.myurl.com/cpanel and once i login i will not see more than 1 hard drive, but instead i will see the total space of ALL hard-drives, so i can just upload 1 file and it will automatically be uploaded to all the hard drives?

If a software like this is not currently available, do you think it'll be possible to program something like this? Or is there a software where you put a file on your website, and website visitors download it and once they run the file and are connected to the internet, their internet connection becomes part of your web server, so when people access your website, some data and cpu usage comes from your web server and some data and cpu usage from users who downloaded the file?

Answer 1

You're talking about 2 different things in your question - mirrored drives and distributed storage.

There are SAN (Storage Area Network) products from EMC for example that can do things that blow your mind with the way storage is handled. There are other local disk to SAN technologies like iSCSI also.

For what you want to do, you want to mirror a folder across 100 servers. I think *nix servers have a RSYNC technology, and Windows Server 2003 R2 has File Replication Services. I do know that FRS (part of Distributed File System technology) will do exactly what you want to do and it comes out of the box in Windows Server 2003 (R2 only) and 2008.

Answer 2

Look at Direct Attached Storage and Storage Area Network.

From what I can tell, the DAS is cheaper as it runs over existing network infrastructure, while a SAN essentially has its own dedicated fiber network that is parallel to the regular network.

actually that wikipedia link is old.. see dell's DAS options for a better example.