As one AC already pointed out, you should check out Ceph (full disclaimer: I work for Inktank now, the consulting services company that employs most of the core Ceph devs). Ceph is, at its heart a Distributed Object store, but we allow you to access in a number of different ways:

• * Native API
• * Via a RESTful interface that can handle native Amazon S3 and Swift API calls
• * As a thinly provisioned block device
• * Mount it as a POSIX-compliant file system via CephFS (although this is a bit rough for production environments just yet)

Josh Durgin has actually done some really interesting work in using the block device (RBD) to back Cinder which you can read a bit about here.

The cool part about Ceph is it was designed to be massively scalable (petabytes and beyond) and extremely fault tolerant / HA / etc. DreamHost actually just built out a huge production deployment of Ceph and OpenStack for their new DreamCompute / DreamObjects offering. If you have questions feel free to hit up the #Ceph irc channel at irc.oftc.net or poke me via email (my UN at inktank.com) and I'll see if I can't find the right person to help.

OpenStack really has some awesome potential, and we're excited about poking at it more with our semi-sharp Ceph-stick. Good luck.

Now that Ceph is gathering momentum since having been included in the mainline kernel, what other storage (or low level) advancements do you see on the horizon?

(full disclosure: I work for Inktank now, the consulting/services company that employs most of the core Ceph engineers)

Now that Ceph is gathering momentum since having been included in the mainline kernel, what other storage (or low level) advancements do you see on the horizon?

(full disclosure: I work for Inktank now, the consulting/services company that employs most of the core Ceph engineers)

Poor quality is still quality.

I don't think anything short of a Constitutional amendment is going to protect our property against unreasonable searches and seizures

Why would a new amendment make any more difference than the ones we already have?

Isn't the quote actually "Houston, we've had a problem?"

I know Tom Hanks said it the other way but c'mon submitter.

While I agree the gene pool could use a bit more chlorine...what happens when one of these undesirables happens to jump the curb and take out a Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, etc? It's not just the individual hurting themselves which is what drives the lawmakers to action. Personally I'm all for on-the-spot executions for any infraction, just watch out for the white fences. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708739/