Currently, we have a single server hosting all content: music, video and software. This content is downloaded by users through HTTP. Now free space is coming to an end and we are exploring different ways of extending our storage capacity. We want to do it cheap, simple and reliable (protected from disk/ server faults). Currenly, we see two ways:
Add a couple of cheap servers with 4 disks (RAID1 ?), run some distributed file-system on top, like GlusterFS. Pros: hopefully, we will see all our disks as single flat file system, just dump content into it and be done. Cons: could be tricky in configuration and handling of faults.
Add a couple of cheap servers, all running HTTP servers. Each piece of content (be it a music file or video) is placed on randomly selected two servers. Pros: don't have to deal with RAID, as content is duplicated; single server failure does not bring down any part of content; doubled distribution capacity (as any signle file could be downloaded from any of two servers hosting it). Cons: requires some scripting on part of distribution of content, adding/ removing servers.
Do we miss any other ways? Which of the aforementioned options seems to be the best?
