Want to sort of create a distributed file system?

Question

Where I work there is about 400 employees split between several campuses at the two main campuses we have servers set up and shared folders on the servers. I want to setup a system so we have one shared folder that users see but then have copies of all the files on both servers and access the files based on which campus the user is at to stop people having wait while files transfer, and then only if a file is changed force them to have to access the latest copy of the file, and then transfer all files changed overnight so it is not slowing down the network during the day.

Can anyone tell me is there a system that already does this? Or what keywords I should be using when trying to search for a system that does this?

I have been looking at creating a system to do this using MS SQL Server 2012 FileTables and putting triggers on the tables to check which table had the latest copy of the file and creating a store procedure to compress and transfer changed files overnight.

Answer 1

What about Distributed File System?

Answer 2

There are multiple distributed filesystems for this.

AFS (Andrew FileSystem) might be interesting: http://www.openafs.org/

Some other solutions are:

for Linux

• FedFS, the Federated File System which uses only NFS at this moment
• DFS for Samba

fow Windows

• DFS = Distributed File System, search Wikipedia for it (I'm not allowed to post >2 links here, because I'm a new user)

Personally I don't have much experience with these solutions. However, I suggest you should investigate AFS first, it is a well-maintained cross-platform system.

Answer 3

Assuming you're using Windows throughout your company, BranchCache may be of interest. NB: this requires that your users are on at least Windows 7.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831696.aspx

This allows you to host files on a central server, with cached copies being held either on local servers at each branch, or on local machines (i.e. if you have branches without server rooms / don't want to invest extra in the cache server). If the option's available I'd recommend having a cache server at each office as this will improve the reliability of file availability (i.e. not affected by a user rebooting or turning off their workstation).

I don't think there's any precache OOTB (though not 100% sure), but this could be enabled easily through scripting (i.e. have a script at each branch which requests any new files, thus causing them to become cached).