Comment by soeren
18 years ago
The linked computers can be used for a kind of distributed storage system (like GFS). Say each user shares an amount of storage resources and can use a specific amount of storage of the system. If the users are willing to accept such a deal, you can reduce the cost of your own storage resources. A major problem of course is the reliability of the system.
There's a recent research project called Farsite which tries to answer these questions.
http://research.microsoft.com/~adya/pubs/osdi2002.pdf