I'm sure this comes up every so often, but right now in order to do shared storage between Linodes you need to use DRBD, which works but it's a bit clunky and given the relatively high price of Linode's storage (understandable given how Linodes work) it's also a bit painful in that you have to have (in total) twice as much storage as you actually need (or N times as much if you have N linodes sharing it).

It’d be great if Linode offered a SAN product. I'm fairly sure that a lot of Linode's customers want features that are more easily provided by a SAN-based offering (such as redundancy, scalability, online provisioning/resize, the ability to share storage across a cloud of Linodes without DRBD ), and most of us are not likely to be worried about a small amount of extra latency in exchange.

You don't have to use DRBD, you could use NFS or GlusterFS.

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We use NFS, but I'd love to swap that out for some kind of Linode provided, redundant, network storage. Scalability would be something else we'd like. I don't normally need a server with more than 2 Gigs of RAM, but I often need one with more than 48 Gigs of space.

You could use NFS or GlusterFS, but neither of those provide any redundancy. A Linode-provided SAN system would, as tubaguy50035 says, provide a scalable redundant solution that could be used for data storage as well as allowing for shared access from multiple Linodes.

GlusterFS does provide redundancy you can replicate across multiple servers if one dies the other can still serve.

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Linode is great for things that fit on a Linode sized machine but it loses out on flexibility like this. Can you re-engineer your applications to use some form of cloud storage like s3 instead of local disk?

Of course we COULD!

Our storage needs are normally database related. Big databases, not a lot of use. So we have several big powerful linodes, that we hardly use (except storage). We've talked about hosting them elsewhere but we're worried about latency.

I phrased that badly. I meant could you re-engineer your applications to use some form of cloud storage reasonably easily and in such a way they would still work acceptably? If you are using big SQL databases that's not going to be easy.

Flexible storage is something that would really rock, but people have been asking for it for years and it has never happened. Now Linode has a kick-ass network it should be possible to add a few iSCSI or NFS servers to each site.

Again, we could. It still ends up being easier for us to have it all at Linode.

I know people have been asking for a while. Hopefully you're right about the new network helping out.

I'm not convinced of that -- sharing a couple gigabits per host is not spectacular for storage usage.

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Thread revival!

I have been a Linode customer for 4 years now, and have been very happy with the service, but need more storage (big plus if it's redundant, but I do have offsite backup anyways), and Linode doesn't offer it. I need about 150GB of storage, but don't need much RAM and CPU at all, so it doesn't make sense to pay $80/mo, when I can get redundant and very flexible storage on AWS for $30/mo.

I have no choice but to switch to AWS, only reason being they have EBS.

It's something that's very easy for Linode to do, and would probably help keeping a lot of customers.

One netapps filer and the integration scripting that goes with it would get decent NFS storage to anyone who wants to pay for it. Netapps may lend Linode a play filer at no cost if Linode ask nicely. Or there is the cheap route of building NFS servers yourself.

It's unknown how many customers would pay for more storage though.

Yeah there are a million ways they can do this, and none of them is really difficult.

I definitely would pay for it if reasonably priced (ie. not $40/mo for 96GB).

Building one myself is not really an option. It has to be at Linode with high bandwidth tubes to the VPSes. Of course, using another Linode is not an option either (way too expensive just for storage).

I actually tried using Amazon S3 with S3QL on my Linode before deciding to switch. It's just too slow, and too complicated. At that point it's much easier to switch the whole thing to AWS.

Have you ever operated at the scale Linode is operating at?

I assure you, this sort of thing is most definitely **not** simple nor inexpensive to implement well.

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Sure, there are challenges. But difficulty is relative. Implementing this sort of thing at the scale is much easier than implementing many other things they have already implemented at the scale.