Enterprises often try to simplify their IT infrastructure by centralizing or consolidating their distributed file servers, particularly Microsoft Windows servers. Today most file servers can’t be consolidated because distributed users would have to access them over a WAN which degrades the performance so much that the file servers become virtually unusable.

Why Do File Servers Perform Poorly on WANs?

There are three reasons why Windows file servers perform so poorly on WANs. First, WANs typically have a tiny fraction of the bandwidth a server normally enjoys on a LAN. Second, WAN throughput is subject to the behavior of TCP, which can drastically reduce the performance of the file system. Third, the Windows file sharing protocol (CIFS, or the Common Internet File System) is a highly chatty protocol that rides on top of TCP, creating additional latency delays. If you don’t fix all three problems, access to centralized file servers is going to suffer.

Riverbed has the Solution

Deploying Riverbed Steelhead appliances allows file servers to be consolidated without sacrificing performance for end users.

Consolidating remote office servers offers a host of benefits:

• Reduced complexity. Maintaining dozens or even hundreds of distributed file servers is very complicated. Windows servers in particular require frequent maintenance, patches, and upgrades. Since even large enterprises maintain little to no IT staff in remote offices, keeping distributed servers up to date requires travel and other additional costs that can be avoided.

• Increased efficiency. Consolidating distributed servers that are lightly utilized can save you both hardware and software costs. In many cases, the disk and CPU utilization on distributed file servers is very low, yet each one requires a full server license and all the associated upgrades and maintenance. Consolidating servers to a couple or even a single data center requires fewer large centralized servers to be deployed with much higher utilization.

• Reduced risk. Maintaining distributed file servers means distributed files and other confidential data that needs to be secured and backed up regularly. Since in most cases, remote office servers can’t be backed up to data centers over the WAN, backup is done locally. Most IT managers agree that local tape backup processes are risky, with the odds of a successful restore after a server failure less than 50%. By centralizing file servers, backup is performed in the data center by professional staff using highly reliable backup systems.