remote redundant file server

[freekain]

I was wondering how/what a person would do to deploy a redundant file server at a remote location?

to give you an idea of where we stand,
We run a win2003/citrix environment where all of our profiles/data/etc are stored on a file server and we got thinking today that if something ever did happen we'd be in a whole heap of trouble. I have regular backups, but it would take time to get those going. so we were thinking about setting up a redundant file server at one of our remote branches, so if something did happen they could failover to that one.
sounds great to me, but I'm stuck scratching my head on this one, I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about implementing this.

any suggestions/pointers/articles/etc? would be greatly appreciated!

thanks in advance

 

[tfg13]

First question would be how reliable/fast is your connection to the remote offices? Are you sure that restoring from this remote location would take less time than restoring from tape?

The second thing is, have you thought of network load balancing? This could be of assistance in this situation....

 

[freekain]

a reliable/fast connection isn't too important, what we are wanting is an entire live copy/mirror of our file server at a remote branch. we have users at that remote branch that would greatly benefit from a set of live servers there. So if something does happen (I'm not going to say it) then the remote branch would serve the profiles/data, and we could get to work on our local server, with no downtime.

Haven't thought of load balancing, will take a look into it and see if it's something we could use.

 

[tfg13]

Actually, the connection is of importance. You cannot have a full copy/mirror of a server in a remote location without the copy/mirror servers talking with each other. What I mean is do you want all changes to the servers to replicate? When someone makes a change to a file on one server, wouldn't you want the change to reflect on the other? That is where the thought of load balancing/mirroring of your servers comes in. Much like a DC at that remote location, the files would replicate to make sure that all changes made are reflected on both servers. Hence, the need for a reliable connection comes in. Granted, you can have replication happening on off/down time hours, which would not require as fast a connection.

 

[freekain]

Let me rephrase that- the connection is too important to us as we've got a T1 connection between the two offices.

As for the replication, yes we would like the changes to reflect on the remote server. Maybe replicate it at night when the network traffic is at a minimum or take the hit and do it real-time. either way we would be happy.
but still as far as setting it up I'm in the dark.

I've looked into load balancing, do you have any recommended reading that would help me out, I keep finding doc's on load balancing a webserver and am not too sure if this is the same thing.

 

[tfg13]

This should get you pointed in the right direction:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Serv/2003/standard/proddocs/en-us/default.asp