I’ve wanted that for years, but I’ve largely dismissed it as a pipe dream, because it doesn’t fit cleanly into the drive/RAID/LVM/filesystem model that everything uses. The only thing that I’ve seen that even comes close is Drobo, and it’s supposedly fairly slow and really just too “magic” for me to trust.

[Even this isn’t what I really want… although the Drobo seems nice. I want the same sort of thing, but I want to two pools… one for the time machine backups and one for the “live boot image” type backup. I admit that in some cases that might be overkill, but not for business related stuff. I admit that it wouldn’t take long because of the “virtual nature” of so many apps to go from blank machine or disk to up and running (all my code is in repositories, schedule, mail and stuff is on the web etc., but still) but I keep a fairly up to date back up anyway, because if the failure occurs near a deadline (and doesn’t it always? Praise Murphy!) I don’t really want to be mucking about with that, I just want to get things done. Anyway, having two per machine would make it easy to have both, and having one hardware device that could do that or more would make it easier to manage. In the meantime the individual hard drives are piling up… I should add that a pair of Drobo’s per machine seems costly to me… Other suggestions?]
Source: *scottstuff*