Storage convergences

When you sit in a cubicle all day, you get a little stir-crazy and come up with weird ideas. (Warning: the following weird idea may actually exist and be in production; who knows.)

I was recalling this Symantec weblog posting about the concept of "parasitic storage". Then I wondered, instead of this concept being used for evil, what if you used it for good?

Consider that in a relatively large company, you'll have hundreds or thousands of desktop computers and laptops sitting around, each with a very large hard drive. I'd bet that the average worker has less than 20 GB of stuff on their main disk. If you used a technology like Google File System, you could drastically increase the size of your network storage.

(Just make sure that you don't get so aggressive that you leave your users without swap space. Also remember that if a lot of the computers are laptops, you'll need more redundancy because those laptops could drop off the grid at any second.)

Feel free to email me and show me the vendor that's already implemented this, so I can feel stupid.