Distributed filesystems in Debian

[Brett Viren <bv@bnl.gov>]

About a month ago the issue of distributed filesystems in Debian was
raised here.  Since then, has anyone had any experiences, good or bad?

Personally, I am looking for a good way to serve 16 disks (8TB), split
into two nodes to a cluster of 18 nodes.

My requirements (or maybe better "desires") are:

 - present a single, monolithic as possible large filesystem

 - enough redundancy so one dead disk doesn't kill the whole
 filesystem's files

 - RAID0 like parallelism to avoid bottlenecks

 - Free Software (Debian packages best), simple install and
 maintenance.  

 - Good match to my cluster size (10s of nodes), additional hardware
 not required.

 - Makes my morning coffee for me.

Currently I'm leaning towards using Lustre, but I worry it may not be
a good fit to the small size of my cluster.  I'd also enjoy hearing
about the applicability of PVFS2 and Red Hat's GFS.

-Brett.