Content Store in two Hard Disck

[jlabuelo]

Good Afternoon all

I have a question about a possible Alfresco Configuration. Imagine that I get to a point where I have Alfresco installed in a HardDisk of 100 GB, and it gets full.

Would it be possible to add a new Hard Disk to the Server and make the Content Store to be splited in these two hard disks?

Is there any place where I can find documentation about this configuration?
How can you add more physical space to your Alfresco Content Store dinamically? is it possible? how to solve the "non-space" vs "more space needed" after sometime working with Alfresco?

Thanks a lot for your help in advance!!

[mrogers]

Some points.  
a)You may be able to run with software that maps some sort of "virtual filesystem" onto your multiple physical drives.    There's a lot of choice available out there.
b) How much does a 100GB drive cost these days?   It may be easier and cheaper just to go out and buy a bigger disk!

[jlabuelo]

Hhehe, sure I totally agree with you with option b), it was just an example to know what to do in case a configuration that needs to hold the content store in two disks is needed.

Yeah, I supposed there was something similar to the option a) you mention, however dont know any (sorry my system administration knowledge is quite bad :? )… any examples I can start taking a look at?…. just for learning 

Thanks for the reply!!

[mrogers]

What OS are you running on?

[jlabuelo]

Linux Ubuntu 8 is the system we use. But before we used to have it in Windows 2003 Server

Thanks for the comments!!

[jtp]

Wouldn't the Caringo CASTOR plugin for alfresco work for this?

[vgsiz]

Some points.  

b) How much does a 100GB drive cost these days?   It may be easier and cheaper just to go out and buy a bigger disk!

sorry but pricing of hard disks is not the issue.
imagine having a system and you first need to migrate it to another file system with all the content on it. May be this can be done at SOHO systems but are a lot more difficult in an enterprise where you could work with Terabyte(s) of total documentsize and several billions of documents.

It should be possible to add an additional drive with a second ( third, etc ) alf_data location

that's my point of view 

[mrogers]

Agreed.  But the question was about a small disk drive.   

Large enterprises tend to have disk management solutions already in place, so it's simply a configuration task to allocate more space.    The point of any solution is to break the link between the alf-data folder and a single physical disk drive.     This is probably done at both hardware level (e.g. RAID) and application level.

The sys admins out there should be able to come up with lots of solutions for partitioning, replicating and backing up a file system.

[jlabuelo]

Hi there all

I see I brought an interesting question to the forum  . Yes, the aim of my example using a 100GB drive was to ask how we could manage a situation where in the server we have alfresco installed, the hard disk is not big enough for the amount of documents and content we have to manage, that there is no other way to solve this situation that adding physical GB's using a new Hard Drive…. would it be possible to manage an alf_data folder in two hard disks?. The example using TB's is better lets say to describe this need. I know large enterprises they have big teams of System Admin people that would know how to manage…. but I would like to learn about this things and how to use it with Alfresco also  :?: 

Sorry if the question is silly, as my System Administration knowledge is quite poor, as I said before.

If you have options like software that would manage virtually these two hard disks into a unique virtual disk and alf_data running on it… I will appreciate it if you can point me to them so I can learn about them.

JTP answered to this post with

Caringo CASTOR plugin

What is this plugin for? any place I can find document about it? Does it really work for what we are discussing about here?

Looking forward to hear your ideas!! :wink:

[mikeh]

Each major Operating System has a way to expand a virtual disk across numerous physical drives, however this is only a stop-gap until you've filled all the drive connectors!

Large installations would use something like a SAN (Storage Area Network) and/or a service like Amazon S3 which grows as large as your wallet allows.

Thanks,
Mike