WindowsAdminGuru BLOG

A Whole New Option In spite of the failures of both caching technologies like eCDNs and distributed filesystems to address the central issues in WAN file sharing, these technologies do provide important components for solving the WAN file-sharing problem. New WAFS products combine distributed filesystems with caching technology to allow real-time, read-write access to shared file storage from any location, while also providing interoperability with standard file sharing protocols such as NFS and CIFS. WAFS products enable transparent worldwide design collaboration on the same data set, without complicated replication schemes or slow network performance. WAFS products will cache files in a read-write mode at remote locations, thus speeding up data access for remote users tremendously. WAFS enables LAN semantics for file access to be extended to the entire enterprise. WAFS systems usually consist of edge file gateway (EFG) appliances, which are placed at remote offices, and one or more c...

Distributed enterprises virtually cover the globe. Remote offices are everywhere and remote office workers now far outnumber those who work out of central office locations. With this distribution of resources, today's companies must manage development efforts across multiple remote locations which means that they must also somehow enable all remote office workers and team members, worldwide, to collaborate on the same shared files and data at the same time. Add to this the fact that file sizes and data storage requirements are increasing year after year, and the efficient sharing of files across distributed enterprises over the wide area network (WAN) has become a Herculean task. File sharing over the WAN - Storage Networking The problem is that although gigabytes of data can easily be shared over a local area network (LAN) using standard file server technology, they cannot so easily be shared across remote offices connected over the WAN. In truth, standard file server protocols pr...