Replicated storage over wan

LizardKing · 1 Feb 2011 at 11:41

I'd appreciate some input on this?

We have 2 remote offices that I'm looking at installing 2 file servers that will give them a local copy of our file-server to alleviate the slowness of the network links between the offices and allow them to carry on working should they loose internet access.
Unfortunately like all things none business critical (and in fairness this is more of a learning exercise than anything else) there is no money for investment.

DFS replication would have been perfect for this except all servers are 2003R1 and MS never implemented this till R2 :rolleyes:

File replication isn't really the hard part here, what I'm not sure on is how i'd get the user requests to be automatically served by there local server?
thanks

Teledude · 1 Feb 2011 at 12:15

Upgrade the systems to R2?!

RSR · 1 Feb 2011 at 12:42

Is the data based on a SAN or or File based server?

Looks like you need some WAFS software, something like iShared should work. However I am not sure if that's still in production. Another option is to look at Riverbed but that's a cost option.

Will Gill · 1 Feb 2011 at 12:46

wansync?

LizardKing · 1 Feb 2011 at 13:55

Thanks for the suggestions

Unfortunately this really is a no money solution as its only for 12 or so users. I'm just looking at ways i may be able to help the poor suckers stuck on flakey adsl lines!

bigredshark · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:03

Don't bother looking, DFS-R is the answer here. There isn't a better option that's cheap or sensible (ie. I can think of other ways but they'd be silly money). I suppose you might also do something very custom with GFS and some fancy GSLB-alike DNS but again, not worth the effort. DFS-R and well configured AD is how to solve this problem.

ruffneck · 1 Feb 2011 at 16:41

bigredshark said:
Don't bother looking, DFS-R is the answer here. There isn't a better option that's cheap or sensible (ie. I can think of other ways but they'd be silly money). I suppose you might also do something very custom with GFS and some fancy GSLB-alike DNS but again, not worth the effort. DFS-R and well configured AD is how to solve this problem.

I agree, we use it here works great and does exactly what you want out of the tin. upgrade to R2 or 2008/R2

MikeHiow · 2 Feb 2011 at 03:11

Unison is worth a look, if only for keeping the files synced - it handles this exact scenario very well (syncing three ways).

LizardKing · 2 Feb 2011 at 08:33

I'd love to be able to use dfs-r, i just cant see them wanting to fork out for 2008 just for this purpose

Thanks Mike, that Unison looks like it may do the job of replication without me having to go into the realms of drbd and gluster

MikeHiow · 2 Feb 2011 at 10:14

You have the added bonus (no idea if the other solutions do it) of using a compression algorithm based on rsync for updating - so it's incredibly efficient and will not upload more than it has to, even if that means part of the file (where possible - obviously).

DRZ · 2 Feb 2011 at 14:32

Bitwise rsync is good but I'm not sure I would use it in this scenario.

Is it really a £0 budget thing or can you justify some cost by identifying some kind of wider gain?