I have been searching for some information on how to recover from a BRTFS drive failure and ran across this file system. It is over kill for the everyday NAS builder but very interesting. It is the 1st time i have ever seen a (SDS) software defined storage system. Its called LizardFS and they take a strange approach to the way they handle the whole file system. As quote from their website
"LizardFS keeps metadata and the data separately. Metadata is kept on metadata servers, while data is kept on chunkservers. Check up a typical installation on the scheme.
LizardFS makes files secure by keeping all the data in many replicas spread over all available servers. It can also be used to build affordable storage as it runs perfectly on commodity hardware. Disk and server failures are handled transparently without any downtime or data loss.
interesting Ideal not sure how viable. Just wanted to share something new i found with the group.