UPDATE: I don’t recommend this. See comment #4 – all you do is at your own risk.
If you want to have unlimited space like what google.com is doing with gmail, then here’s what you need to do. I used Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon to test out the solution.
- Setup and understand the usage of a LVM
- Setup iSCSI or AoE for network devices so that network storage can be used easily
- Setup RAID so that redundancy can be provided to LVM Physical Volumes
Important: Following steps may corrupt your data or partitions. Use them at your own risk. Also, I have listed down the steps as I went ahead doing them. They may not be accurate in your environment or all scenarios may not be covered. I would recommend going through the entire article before attempting anything.
Assumptions
- You are comfortable using Linux and fdisk
- You have backed up your data so that in case something goes wrong, nothing is lost
- You can connect to network and have access to more than 1 Linux machine to do the testing
This article is not complete and does not include the iSCSI and AoE related information as of now. I am working on it and will update it soon. However, you may continue on this page and learn about the LVM 🙂
Vivek's blog 