[Zope] Can Zope OFS span filesystems?

[Terry Hancock]

Hi All,

I've only just gotten to the point of trying to understand
the Zope storage systems (i.e. ZODB, ZEO, etc), and it's
not clear to me from what I've read online so far whether
its possible to have a very large OFS span across multiple
filesystems. I.e. can you mount sections of your Zope
tree on separate disks, and if so, is it transparent to
Zope? (With Unix/Linux FSs, you just buy more hard
drives if you run out of space, but AFAIK, you can't
actually span a file across multiple drives).

Also, can you specify a raw device (e.g. /dev/hda8 )
as the storage file (in other words, treat it as if
Zope were the filesystem, instead of hosting the OFS
on an underlying filesystem)?  (I actually haven't
figured out how to change the storage at all yet,
though the ZEO documentation makes it pretty clear
that it can be done).

I've seen solutions which try to avoid having massive
content like this inside of Zope.  Are they really
necessary? Or could you basically use Zope as the 
filesystem?  Any pros or cons I ought to know about?

For that matter, has anyone actually run Zope with
an OFS that large?  It's still very academic for
me, though I see a possibility of things going that
way, depending on how we design. So really I'm asking
"Should I try to avoid huge storage in Zope?"

Thanks,
Terry

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Terry Hancock
hancock@anansispaceworks.com       
Anansi Spaceworks                 
http://www.anansispaceworks.com 
P.O. Box 60583                     
Pasadena, CA 91116-6583
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