High availability file server with Ubuntu Cloud

Question

Is it possible to achieve a high availability file server with Ubuntu Cloud?

I have four machines with 8TB of space each in 4 2TB HDD

Is it possible to manage storage space dynamically in Ubuntu Cloud 12.04?

My requisites are:

• 8TB of available space for files
• I don't need realtime failure recovery (10-20 minutes of downtime are fine).
• A nice to have would be some sort of "time machine" way of recovering files.

Answer 1

You may want to look into CEPH. It is a highly scalable, highly fault tolerant distributed filesystem. Even if your clients are Windows, you can have a single CEPH filesystem that balances across all 4 machines, and then just run Samba on one of them.

It is available by running apt-get install ceph. Setting it up is pretty straight forward, though there are multiple steps so you'll want to read the docs:

http://ceph.com/wiki/Ceph