TechEd: Check out Windows Server R2 DFS
If you get a chance, check out the new Windows Server R2 distributed file system (DFS). Bob Muglia had a demo in his Windows session showing a 25Mb PowerPoint file being copied and used by a branch office and another office with and without DFS. The traffic over the WAN without DFS was the typical experience today - a long wait time and lots of data being copied. With DFS enabled, the file is replicated and cached locally (obviously, this is done at a pre-determined time) so the experience of bringing up the PowerPoint is pretty fast. This offers a good experience for the initial load, but what about making changes and replicating the changed copy? The DFS also has a differential replication protocol called RDC that only replicates the changes over the WAN no matter what the file type! The demo showed the WAN traffice of copying the full file (non DFS) and then the file via RDC - huge savings in the traffice over the wire.
This has the potential to be a very useful technology for connecting many servers over a WAN and accessing common file. It's been a very common request of all our products, especially Exchange and Outlook, to offer low bandwidth solutions. It will be interesting to see how DFS and RDC can apply across many of the common customer requests in this area. RDC is worth checking out in more depth if you haven't seen it.
