* Cisco throws hat in WAFS ring
File sizes and data storage requirements have been continually on the rise, driven by a sharper focus on disaster recovery, e-business growth, record-keeping-centric legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and the tendency to store increasingly voluminous security-log data. Often, enterprises with many scattered branch sites wish to have a centrally managed storage-area network infrastructure to lower total ownership costs and complexity.
File sizes and data storage requirements have been continually on the rise, driven by a sharper focus on disaster recovery, e-business growth, record-keeping-centric legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and the tendency to store increasingly voluminous security-log data. Often, enterprises with many scattered branch sites wish to have a centrally managed storage-area network infrastructure to lower total ownership costs and complexity.
But then there’s WAN latency (and frustrated users) to deal with, as file requests and backups continually traverse the relatively skinny long-haul links.
This is where a fairly new file-sharing architecture called wide area file services (WAFS) is coming into play. WAFS-based gear combines distributed file systems with caching technology to speed up read-write access to shared file storage from any location and provide interoperability with standard file-sharing protocols (such as Common Internet File System [CIFS] and Network File System [NFS]). These protocols are chatty and thus often perform poorly over the WAN.
WAFS systems usually consist of edge file gateway appliances at remote offices (which appear as local file servers to users in that site), central server appliances and management software.
Last month, for example, Cisco announced WAFS-based appliances and associated software that follow this architecture and represent the first fruits of its August 2004 acquisition of Actona Technologies. You deploy a Cisco Edge File Engine at each branch office and a Core File Engine in your data center(s), which connects directly to one or more file servers or network-attached storage (NAS) gateways there. The Core File Engine processes WAN-optimized file requests on behalf of each Edge File Engine.
Each edge engine acts like a CIFS or NFS proxy, so that users can do what feels like a fast write locally. All configuration and administration can be performed from a central network operations center.
Other companies in the WAFS biz include Disk Sites, Novell, Riverbed Technology and Tacit Networks.
