Windows

In Windows 2000 use DFS (Distributed File System) it will allow you to do just what you want.

URL: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/howto/dfsguide.asp

Hope this helps.

PowerQuest Volume Manager

the DFS Will work fine. I have never had any difficulties with multiple NAS units

There are a couple options:

DFS would be the way I would personally go.
You can make one Domain DFS root, and have 4 links (one for each NAS) under that.
You then map the users drive (pick one) to the DFS root, and they will see 4 folders under that location - each is one of the NAS systems.

If these NAS systems can be directly connected to a server, you can create a volume set that spans all of the drives.

Depending on the NAS systems you bought, there might also be some vendor specific options for 'joining' these.

Chris

Do you know how to mount a volume.

That is, creating a folder on your existing directory structure that points to a whole other storage volumes. Such as going into Disk Management, creating an empty folder on the initial volume and then choosing to mount the empty volume. The procedure is relatively simple and can be extended to gigantic proportions.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/en/advanced/help/default.asp?url=/windows2000/en/advanced/help/mounted_drives.htm

These volumes are now part of the directory structure and if they fail will not effect the rest of the volume. And you can incorporate the original file structure into this solution.

However, I don't know if NAS's will be supported in this, because of the whole network connectivity thing

We currently use DFS redirects to do just that. We have Windows storage server 2003 (NAS) with Windows 2000 DFS route servers redirecting to user shares (pick one) on any one of 4 NAS devices. Currently some 1700 user?s personal areas. We also have storage limits in place which insures that allocated space is not unintentionally overrun.

DFS is a great solutution considering that you already purchased a NAS solution. However, for furture reference, or perhaps it's not to late on your purchase. A better (*) solution would be a iSCSI SAN solution. As such, the iSCSI devices will appear as local drives on the server. Additionally, the performance bennefit of iSCSI over NAS is that iSCSI is packet level instead of file level. When using a NAS to access a file, it will tranfer the entire file to the host (like a copy function) and cannot really use the data until it arrives in full. The packet level will bring the data over just as if you were copying from a local drive, which when working with databases or large files, will give a big performance boost. A slightly more complicated way would to deploy the iSCSI host adapter on your clients, so that they copy the data directly from the iSCSI SAN device instead of NAS -> Server -> Client. iSCSI is more complicated to set up, but it definately has a performnce perk over NAS.

(*) Now for the caviat! Better is a very subjective word, not to be explicity implied that this is best for your situation, but rather generally consider a better situation. Your application may warrant a simplier, more bottom line cost effective, over network performance. Fair enough, DFS/NAS may be BETTER for you.