Global namespace problem

This is one of those buzz-words like virtualization that everybody loves. And loves to define in their own way. Lets first try and understand the problem.

When you buy a storage server or appliance from a vendor, you're pretty much limited by the amount of disk you can attach to it. These days a mid-tier system can start with a capacity of 4TB and grow to 252TB. This is great, but how long before you run out of horsepower on your system CPU? So you keep serving out data on the single system until the CPU is pegged, then buy a new storage system. Worse, you might have started with the low end model, and run out of storage capacity at some lower number.

Cool. Now you tell all your users, hey your old files are on server1:/project, new stuff is on server2:/project. This can quickly spiral out of control. Actually because of volume size limitations, its probably going to be server1:/project1, server1:/project2, server2:/project and so on.

So how do you solve this problem?