If you can’t afford downtime in your office, then you should look into setting up a distributed file system (DFS) for your business.

Many small businesses have a server that is at least four or five years old—and that’s about the life expectancy of a hard drive. As hard drive capacities have increased over the years, the cost has gone down, but the failure rate has gone up, due to packing so much more storage capacity in the same amount of space. If you haven’t had a hard drive failure yet, it could be right around the corner. With a second server and DFS enabled, you can provide quicker access to shared files, load balancing, fault tolerance and redundancy for your business, and make sure your employees are productive.  Most importantly, your business can keep doing what you do best, even if you have a server crash.

If you have a server in your office that is running Windows Server 2003 or newer, you can set up a distributed file system. Traditionally, if your business has more than one location, those locations are connected to each other with a dedicated VPN connection. This allows remote workers to access company documents without having to have redundant servers at each location. The problem with this setup is that the dedicated VPN connection is usually quite a bit slower than the office’s regular Internet connection. If you have many remote users trying to access documents stored on the main server, it can bring that VPN connection to its knees. That is why Microsoft uses the distributed file system. With DFS, the administrator can determine which folders should be copied to which servers, and may set it up so that each server maintains a local copy of those folders. This dramatically increases the speed at which remote workers can access shared files, while significantly reducing the amount of traffic passing over the dedicated VPN connection. The great thing is that you can set up DFS in a single office to ensure that your office keeps working, even if your main server crashes.

Let’s look at an example. We have Betty, who is at branch office A, and Bob who is a branch office B. Betty and Bob both work in the accounting department, so they both frequently access files stored at the main office in the accounting folder on the main server. In the traditional setup, every time Bob or Betty needs to open an Excel spreadsheet, the entire spreadsheet has to be sent over the VPN connection; and Bob can’t access the spreadsheet while Betty is working on it.

With DFS, however, both branch offices have their own local copy of those spreadsheets. Not only can Betty and Bob access the file much faster than they could over the VPN connection, but also they can both have the spreadsheet open at the same time. Any changes that Betty makes to her spreadsheet will be duplicated to both the main server and Bob’s server, and the only thing being transferred over the VPN connection is the changes made to the final document, not the entire document. This opens the door to the possibility of one person trying to edit a document that another user is already editing. As a precaution, only one person can edit a given document at a time. The second person to open that document receives a read-only copy of the document.

By now you may be thinking, “So what? I don’t have any branch offices.” Well, if you set up a second server right next to your existing server, you can still reap the benefits of DFS. Your existing server, server 1, stores all of your important information on it; usernames, passwords, accounting data, customer information and billing information are all in this one location. If you set up a second server, you can set up DFS to automatically copy all of your important data from server 1 and save it on server 2. Once you have the same data on both servers, DFS will do something called load balancing. If one of the servers is busy handling user requests, load balancing can automatically transfer additional user requests to the second server, thus balancing the workload and distributing it between the two servers. This decreases the amount of time it takes to access anything stored in a distributed file system during busy periods of the day.

The most important part of DFS is redundancy. Picture this: You have one server and one night the hard drive crashes. Chances are pretty good that you can restore from last night’s backup—you are backing up every night, right? So the hard drive crashes at 3:00 a.m., the server goes down and starts beeping, and you realize what is going on about 8:00 a.m. as everyone tries to login. You call your IT guy to come in and fix the problem. He gets there at 8:30 a.m. and determines that you have a bad hard drive. You need to replace it and rebuild the server from the backup. Do you have a spare hard drive on hand? If not, your IT guy has to run across town and pick one up. By the time you get the new hard drive replaced and rebuild the server from the backup, its 1:00 p.m. You have just paid your entire office for five hours of standing around because they couldn’t even login to their machines this morning, let alone get any work done.

With a distributed file system, this scenario would have played out much better. The bad hard drive would still be crashed and server 1 would still be beeping, but server 2 would be up and running. Everyone would still be able to log in at 8:00 a.m. The crashed server still wouldn’t be fixed until 1:00 p.m., but you didn’t have to pay your entire office to stand around for five hours. They were able to do their jobs, and actually make you money during this repair. A second server is an added investment, but think about how expensive it is to pay an office full of people who can’t get any work done. Ten people making $20 an hour for five hours of standing around costs you $1,000. One half-day outage would cover the investment in DFS. A second server is like insurance, only better. Insurance only gets used when something bad happens. Your second server will be used every day, making people more efficient and productive. Plus, you will be happy you have your distributed file system in place when that hard drive crashes!

		Mark Williams is the field services technician for PTD Technology, assisting commercial, nonprofit and residential clients. He holds certifications in A+, Network+, Security+, and is a Microsoft Certified Professional.