File sharing over the WAN - Storage Networking

File sharing over the WAN - Storage Networking

File sharing over local area networks (LANs) has become an integral part of enterprise computing. Over 20 years ago, personal computer users realized the benefits of abandoning "sneakernet" by connecting individual computers into a network. This allowed more efficient file sharing and project collaboration for members of a workgroup who were only a cable length away, typically in the same room or building. Now there is a desire for global organizations to share file data in real time among all their locations.

These global organizations now wish to implement wide area network (WAN) based storage consolidation, to reduce storage resource management costs while also enabling remote employees to collaborate on projects just as if they were all on a local network. Given the current state of technology, however, enterprises are forced to limit the deployment of real time file sharing and networks to within each LAN, resulting in disconnected islands of file sharing throughout the enterprise.

Corporations have tried to fix this problem in various ways. For large files or large groups of files, companies may file transfer protocol (FTP) the files overnight. For ad hoc collaboration between employees, people might attach files to email messages. While these solutions are marginally acceptable, they each suffer from the same problem. The file sharing is not in real time with everyone working off the same version of the data. Rather than sharing a single copy among many users, these methods duplicate files and propagate private copies to each user. The moment a file is emailed or FTP'ed, two or more potentially out of sync copies are created. The dissimilar versions need to be manually reconciled, usually after every set of revisions by the people working on the project.