How to scale an asset server on a limited budget ?
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1) The old school UNIX admin solution to this is to make each of your fileservers NFS servers as well and cross-mount them all with each other.
Pros: it's there, easy, and pretty simple to understand
Cons: NFS clients (the whole OS) can get cranky when a NFS server disappears silently and the client attempts to access a file on it.
2) You can set up a machine with small, fast disk, and a reverse-proxy caching solution. Then you can point that cache server at a single server with acres of cheap disk.
Pros: This can be more economical than scaling machines if you're careful: buying SATA ports and connecting more disks can be cheaper than buying whole computers (and rack space, and power, and switch ports) for their SATA ports.
Cons: This technically doesn't solve the problem that you're eventually bounded by a single system's capacity. Also for certain pathologically bad workloads the cache server can thrash and performance will fall off.