File sharing between two offices

[thechinaman]

I think I have posted this before but am not sure....

The place that I work at wants to get the ability to share files across two offices. The office are located in two states (Texas and Oklahoma). All that is desired is the access of files in Oklahoma office by Texas office, and vice versa. We do not want to use filesharing networks, such as Torrent or the like. We are concerned about copyright issues. In essence, we want it to be as private as possible. How can this be accomplished?

[cadtag]

if the sky really is the limit for this budget, how about documentum eRoom? they offer a hosted service at www.eroom.net

discalimer -- no financial interest, it just works well for distributed projects

[Andre Baros]

I've heard of several offices having great luck with the Steelhead Product:
http://www.riverbed.com/products/

with a good review here:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/channels/storageandservers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=170700690

Essentially it works by mirroring two servers so that they always have all the same files on them. One office I talked to is using it between their US and China offices with not problems. If it's all company internal, this is the fastest way to go and totally transparent to your users.

[daviderel]

Why not setup a site-to-site VPN or even a WAN between the two locations? That way you have one network to which everyone belongs and can access 24-7, rather than having files being constantly being passed around or relying on a 3rd party service.

[Andre Baros]

The Steelhead is two pieces of hardware, one at each end, and looks like a VPN... only much much faster. I use a VPN to work from home, and can't imagine relying on that kind of speed for a whole office.

[Avatart]

The way I have overcome this problem before (a 2000 drawing job, between London and Toronto) is to mirror the job area and use a programme called CuteFTP to synch the drives overnight. You do need to delineate which office has control of which drawings, but the setup cost is about $50.

Other than that, you can use WarFTP to create an FTP site and have a virtual directory pointing at your job area, this is a pretty secure way of working, but you will need a static IP address for any of these things to work.

[rkmcswain]

I've heard of several offices having great luck with the Steelhead Product:
http://www.riverbed.com/products/


We use them at each of our sites.



Essentially it works by mirroring two servers so that they always have all the same files on them. One office I talked to is using it between their US and China offices with not problems. If it's all company internal, this is the fastest way to go and totally transparent to your users.

...but that is not how they work.

[Andre Baros]

Oops. I just got that from a quick read of the review. How do they work?

[rkmcswain]

Oops. I just got that from a quick read of the review. How do they work?

It's pretty technical. Even though I sat through the presentation, I can't even begin to explain. But generally speaking, they do cache some data, but they don't mirror a whole server. It works on several different layers of the network, even down to the byte level. So it's not just caching whole files or even strings.

It actually gets faster after it's been installed for a while. Depending on the task, we see anywhere from a 2 to 10x increase in speed. I can browse a remote office using Windows Explorer just like it was the local machine. Before, this was a pain, because each click on a folder took several seconds to refresh.

I can also use Remote Desktop or Remote Assistance on a machine on the WAN just like it was in the next cubicle.

[MarkTheSwampThomas]

You don't want to mirror the data, simply have access to each offices files right? Seems like Windows server should have the ability to do this.

[rkmcswain]

You don't want to mirror the data, simply have access to each offices files right?

You need more than just windows server. You need a data provider that can complete the WAN connections. Then if greater speed is needed, you can look at the Riverbed appliances.

[thechinaman]

I think my workplace is not looking to invest in a server, not at this moment anyways. What is the cheapest method? I don't think that the sky is the limit at my workplace. And I don't think my workplace is looking at FTP as an option. There is internet/email access here. There is also something setup to backup mostly job-related files from each individual computer to an external hard drive.

Thanks