Solved: WAAS and DFS

mlouis · ‎04-04-2009

I have customer that is looking to use WASAS 4.1.1 to accelerate their existing DFS based infrastructure. Basically, they have file servers located in each branch. These file servers consume about 500-1TB of disk space per server. Mainly large construction drawing files in .pdf,.tiff, and .jpeg formats. If they are using DFS to control file coherency of certain folders between the branch, will WAAS/WAFS still offer them CIFS accleration for the replication of these files across the WAN?

dstolt · ‎04-06-2009

Depending on what replication tool they are using, WAAS can definitely accelerate the file replication. Some replication tools don't play well with your coherency models and WAAS, so I would definitely test it. Obviously compression and encryption would raise havoc with acceleration, however copy utilities using CIFS should work well. Even if you don't get full CIFS acceleration (I would assume most of the files are new), DRE and LZ should really do well in this situation as well.

Hope that helps,

Dan

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dstolt · ‎04-06-2009

Depending on what replication tool they are using, WAAS can definitely accelerate the file replication. Some replication tools don't play well with your coherency models and WAAS, so I would definitely test it. Obviously compression and encryption would raise havoc with acceleration, however copy utilities using CIFS should work well. Even if you don't get full CIFS acceleration (I would assume most of the files are new), DRE and LZ should really do well in this situation as well.

Hope that helps,

Dan

mlouis · ‎04-06-2009

As a follow up to this questions. The customer currently has large file servers in their remote branches. They manually copy what files they need from one branch to another. I am planning on recommending a 274 appliance in this case due to the low number of users they have at each site. I have a couple questions though:

1. Cisco does not publish how many peers the 274 will support. Will this small of a box only work in a point to point configuration? What about customers that have any to any connectivity requirements over an MPLS WAN?

2. The 274/474 only support up to 35GB of HD space for the VB. If we were only to run Windows 2008 Core Server, would that much space be adequate for an AD/DHCP/DNS/Print Server in most cases even after updates? Do you have any idea on the storage requirements for MS 2008 servers on a virtual blade? Will 1GB be enough?

These are small sites and I don't want to undersize them from a VB or site to site standpoint.

What do you recommend?