Well, I've been slow off the block getting posts out lately but here is an interesting tidbit that I've been following. Elasticdrive is out for production / commercial use.
http://www.elasticdrive.com/
This really does seem to be worth a serious look and in addition I have some other interesting related information that I'll post when I have more time later today.
Also, this is not the only product on the market like this either. I'll have to dig up the rest of those links as well.
Here is a reproduction of the email I received from the folks at Enomaly today about the release.
ElasticDrive is proud to announce the commercial release of ElasticDrive now available for purchase at https://www.elasticdrive.com/buy.html
ElasticDrive allows you to mount a remote storage resource such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service (s3), Nirvanix and AOL's Xdrive as a local storage device. The benefits of ElasticDrive is that you can have an infinitely large block device that can be mounted and used as a fast and secure remote backup storage resource. The virtual block device can also be made into a RAID as well as used as part of aLVM volume (snapshotting) or even utilized via ISCSI. Learn more at http://www.elasticdrive.com
Storage options
* 250GB for $249
* 500GB for $449
* 1TB for $749
Key Features
* Linux, BSD and Mac OS X supported
* ElasticDrive does not use proprietary device drivers.
* VMware appliance available for easy installation
* Public & Paid Amazon AMI for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
* Simple and Easy to install. - Get up and running in minutes.
* FUSE - A FUSE based file system using a remote storage system as backend store.
* Infinite capacity disk - Partitions can grow!
* Local disk speed - Write through double caching
* ISCSI, EXT3, mdadm Compliant
* Remount file system on ANY machine including virtual machines.
* On-demand recovery - Server dies, or taken offline the system can easily be restored.
* Hot pluggable hard drive for Linux
* Multicast communication and caching of network traffic for scalability and reduced costs
* Copy-on-write functionality
* Snapshot support, where the image only represents changes made to an underlying disk image
* Distributed Raid Array - ElasticDrive RAID devices redundant and provide fault tolerance from disk errors and single disk failure. On failure, the array continues to operate so long as at least one drive is functioning
* Logical volume management (LVM) - Concatenate, stripe together or combine partitions into larger virtual ones that can be resized or moved.
* Useable as raw block devices just as disk partitions are: mountable file systems can be created on them, or they can be used as swap storage.
* Future Proof - Amazon S3, AOL Xdrive, Google Gdrive, Microsoft LiveDrive, or YahooDrive. It doesn't matter, your data can be written any storage system now or in the future. We're just waiting for someone to invent it
Free 40GB Version at http://www.elasticdrive.com/download.html (Remember to bookmark download page after email registration)
About An Enomaly, Our focus, your content - Open Source Consultants
A wide range of successful companies rely on Enomaly's open source consulting experience to increase productivity, improve operational efficiency and reduce risk. Enomaly works closely with medium sized enterprises to plan, prepare, and coordinate achievable client-specific web management and open source strategies. These tools effectively allow enterprises to be more efficient and operate more successfully.
Enomaly offers a wide range of strategic advisory services including business application development, information & content management, and open source migration support.
Enomaly provides consulting services on leading open source platforms including TYPO3. Apache, Zope, Plone, MYSQL, Suse, Redhat, Jetspeed and Jboss.
To learn more about Enomaly, visit www.enomaly.net
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