On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 8:14 PM, Adam Tauno Williams <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 10:14 -0700, Eric Shubert wrote: >> Robert LeBlanc wrote: >> > I'm trying to think about how to setup a Samba system and would like to >> > pick >> > the brains of some experts. We are looking up put a large amount of storage >> > ~75TB in a central data center. We have some remote (ok, not remote, but >> > across slower links, ok if you consider several hundred clients over 1Gb to >> > be slow) locations that we would like to set up samba servers that 'cache' >> > the file system and serve it up to the clients in the building and sync >> > with >> > the main data center storage. > > a.) I don't think you can really do that with a 'file server' > > b.) I believe what you describe is almost exactly how AFS works. > <http://www.openafs.org/> > "OpenAFS is the world's foremost location independent file system." > > c.) Most SAN vendors provide a block-level replication solution for > their products. > >> The idea is have a couple of TB that are >> > located in the building that serve up the Samba share. When a client >> > requests a file, if it's in the local cache it is served up from there, if >> > not then the Samba server grabs the file from the main data center and >> > serves it to the client. When a file is written, something like rsync is >> > used to transfer only difference back to the main data center. The problem >> > is that I'm not sure of a file system that does this. We are using Lustre >> > on >> > our HPC, but this won't do what we want. > > With all the fun of file locking, concurrent access, etc... I think what > you describe just won't work, or at least will never work well. Why not > just you a groupware server that supports document check-out and > check-in; that seems like the correct solution to me. Or possibly > something like iFolder <http://ifolder.com/ifolder>
WAFS (Wide Area File System) appliances can be very well deployed for this sort of thing precisely. Unfortunately, I don't know of any opensource project for WAFS. However, commercial solutions such as Riverbed, Expand Networks, CISCO/WAFS, Juniper/Peribit do exist. Regards, /rkc CTO DCiEra (P) Ltd -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba
