Unified Virtual Storage: Virtualization of Distributed Storage in a Network

This paper describes a way to efficiently utilize free disk space on Desktop machines connected over a network. In many Networks today, the local disks of a client node are only used sporadically. This is an attempt to manage the data storages in a network efficiently and to provide the software support for sharing of disk space on Desktop machines in LAN. In the current situation, storage expansion on conventional servers has constraints like, maximum expansion limitation, costly affair and in case of hardware replacement, up gradation, the manual relocation of Data becomes messy. UVS (Unified Virtual Storage) is an attempt to efficiently utilize freely available disk space on Desktop machines connected over a network. Its purpose is to reduce load of data traffic on network server, to efficiently utilize space on client nodes thereby avoiding wastage of space. It also eliminates Hardware restriction for Storage Expansion and provides Location transparency of data store. The main advantage of UVS is