> BTW Striping across machines is probably not very useful. If one machine
> fails, data is completely lost. Mirroring, in turn, _is_ very useful, and
> several huge customers worldwide are just in the process of installing the
> said commercial product (no advertising intended). Data Centers are between
> 3 km and more than 100 km apart.
That is the potential flaw with stripping regardless; the fact that multiple
machines are involved has no effect in this as only disk drive failures result
in data lost. The whole point of stripping is to boost performance at the
price of reliability. Spreading it across a LAN could be a big win for an
I/O intensive application.
John