Sounds like you want something more custom built if you want to wake up hosts when needed to access the media on them, that’s not a very common setup. Maybe just a plain old set of SMB shares with the images on them for something simple! I suppose you’d want some kind of index kept on an always-on host to be able to figure out which host to wake up.
Distributed storage with all the hosts online 24/7 is more common, and Immich could certainly handle that just fine as your storage backend would be doing the work of distributed storage (Ceph or similar), and Immich doesn’t even need to be aware of it.
Sounds like you want something more custom built if you want to wake up hosts when needed to access the media on them, that’s not a very common setup. Maybe just a plain old set of SMB shares with the images on them for something simple! I suppose you’d want some kind of index kept on an always-on host to be able to figure out which host to wake up.
Distributed storage with all the hosts online 24/7 is more common, and Immich could certainly handle that just fine as your storage backend would be doing the work of distributed storage (Ceph or similar), and Immich doesn’t even need to be aware of it.