I administrate a large windows network and I would like to make use of the unused space on the workstations, is there a free way to do this?
Let's say we have:
- 200 Windows workstations each with 500GB hard-drives, the consumed space on the drives is always less than 50GB.
- The users of this network store their files on dedicated file-servers, no user-data is stored locally on the workstations.
- 200 x hard-drives, each with 450GB free = 87.89 Terabytes of unused disk-space distributed across the network.
I am looking for a way to make use of this idle disk space in a reliable manner, choosing data-integrity first over speed of access.
I have heard before of distributed storage on the Internet using P2P like networks, where users choose to delegate a certain percentage of their disk-space to the network in exchange for them to store data on other drives around the world, in a distrubuted fashion whereby data is duplicated to still provide access if some clients go offline.
Obviously doing that anonymously on the Internet causes other potential issues but I am looking to do that kind of thing on a local network in a controlled environment, not for everyday user use but more archival, long-term storage.
Almost like a Distributed File System, self-managing, encrypted, data replication for redundancy when workstations go offline.
A Windows based service would probably best suit my needs, running silently in the background, able to be set to a low priority in terms of load on the workstation. Obviously the data-store should be encrypted, perhaps even P2P in nature so other clients work together to stream data to replicate?
If anyone knows of software that can achieve this please do enlighten me, if it's free then all the better! Thanks for your time & help.