Networking Unix Systems

I can see myself running into a problem a few months down the road, so I figured I'd try to fix it in advance.

I have a system of perl scripts that store information into a massive database. This system of scripts is on a 160GB hard drive (and mirrored with RAID 1 onto another). The problem I predicty myself facing is that the database will become to large for the 160GB drive, and inevitably to large for the entire computer. So what first comes to mind is a network of Unix Computers. Are there any web sites that are particurally helpful for networking computers that are in a datacenter? Is this even a good idea? Does the simple OPEN command in perl allow access to other network computers in Unix?

Thanks for the advice.

Well, if you NFS mount a drive, open() will work just fine. The nice thing about UNIX and UNIX-like OSs is that the "everything is a file" philosophy is particularly good at handling scenarios like this. The application is unaware if a directory exists on a hard disk, a cd rom, a floppy disk, a networked drive or whatever, because the OS takes care of hiding those details.

You should research on NFS and potentially Beowulf. Google is very helpful here.