Have you people read this:
http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html
It's not "company research paper" in the sense that it contains actually interesting information. It's not exactly new, but not terribly old either.
Might be that it's been mentioned here before. I can't remember, and could find anything with forum search, so thought I'd throw it at you, because somebody raised some filesystem stuff up...
I definitely like the basic concept. Comments, please.