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 -----Original Message----- From: samba-boun...@lists.samba.org [mailto:samba-boun...@lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of Adam Tauno Williams Sent: Sunday, April 11, 2010 8:15 PM To: samba@lists.samba.org Subject: Re: [Samba] Ideas for distributed Samba servers 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> -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba