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Is there a good cross-platform, storage virtualization application available?  I want a magical, automatically-clustered-and-redundant service that concatenates all of the free space within an entire network into a single “megadrive” and makes that available as a shared drive to all systems.

Ideally, it would allow you to “hotswap” computers in and out of the ad-hoc array, mirroring the data between nodes as necessary to ensure that more than one copy of all data is available at all times.  I suppose this is similar to the approach that Google has been taking with their distributed file system.

You could combine all of the storage within your network into a massively-redundant shared drive.  Every night, you could even move all of the data closer to the nodes that request it most often.

If you run out of space on the ad-hoc array, just run out and buy a couple of drives and USB 2.0 enclosures to get by in the meantime.

I suppose I can keep on dreaming, but true storage virtualization would be an amazing feat.

Afterthought: I’d like a clustered filesystem that ran over TCP/IP/Ethernet rather than the expensive fibre-channel stuff.  I’ll take mega-storage over mega-performance in this case.