.Dust

It is amaz­ing how some­times peo­ple com­bine things together to bring to life some­thing new.

I have found this arti­cle on the Inter­net explain­ing how to build a com­pletely free RAID 5 vir­tual sys­tem using only freely avail­able soft­ware and ser­vices. This is cool.

The main con­cept is illus­trated in the picture.

In order to have your sys­tem up and run­ning you will need:

• A set of free ftp accounts on the Inter­net. Nowa­days you can eas­ily find lot of them around. Just google for it.
• Net­drive. Net­drive will allow you to map an Inter­net resource like an FTP server to a local log­i­cal drive. In this par­tic­u­lar case it will help you cre­ate the hard dri­ves that will be the core of your vir­tual raid system.
• VMWare Server. This will help you to cre­ate a vir­tual sys­tem that will host the soft­ware to run your RAID vir­tual system.
• FreeNAS. This is the core soft­ware of your system.

All of these resources will not cost you a dime.

Going through the doc­u­ment you will see that set­ting up this sys­tem is some­how tricky and you will def­i­nitely need some sort of knowl­edge in order to get it working.

The web sites says that this is more of a proof of con­cept but I do note really see why thisshould not work.

Actu­ally there are great issues with this kind of archi­tec­ture (Avail­abil­ity, per­for­mance, etc) but this is really a great idea.

Unfor­tu­nately this seems to be ori­ented to Win­dows machines and I would like to see some­thing sim­i­lar on a Mac.

I love to see how peo­ple can mix up dif­fer­ent prod­uct in order to bring new ideas on the table. In some way this is uncon­ven­tional inno­va­tion and I really appre­ci­ate this kind of approach.

Related posts:

1. Vir­tual Worlds and the birth of a new diplomacy
2. Set my mobile phone free
3. Vir­tual reports and innovation
4. Bat­tery killed the Mobile Inter­net star
5. The Inter­net in your phone