[9fans] How would you implement this...

[app <porttikivi@gmail.com>]

I am thinking of an "infinite" disk customer product. The customer
would buy a large (say 1 TB) network disk device (Linksys NSLU2 or
similar) with USB/Ethernet interfaces, serving CIFS/Samba an maybe
some other file protocols for users who know nothing of Plan 9.

The disk device would run Plan9/Fossil. Somewhere on the Internet, a
Venti service would be offered for a reasonable monthly fee. When the
user fills his 1 TB, it becomes just a cache for the Venti server, so
that user's most recently used 1 TB of data is always available
locally, but the logical disk size is infinite, backed up by Venti,
and the archives are also kept forever, as long as you pay few dollars
a month...? Note that two typical customers could share 90% of the
scores/blocks, if they have roughly the same software (Windows,
Office, Mozilla.org stuff) installed on their machines.

If remote access speed is a problem, you could set up regional Venti
servers, and just market the device regionally.

Anyway, I bet 99,99% of users don't access more than couple of
gigabytes of data in a small time window. And there could be some
simple mechanism to mark that 10 year old movie directory for
prefetching, if you know you need to watch them tomorrow.