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Introduction to Policy-Based File Area Network
Sixteen years ago,
TNS had only a few PCs (Personal Computers)—a handful of people had
them, most did not. Now, just about everyone in our offices has a
PC, and it’s not uncommon for some of us to use more than one at the
same time. Initially, files were shared using floppy disks, but
this eventually became very impractical. New ways to network PCs
and share files were discovered, and we also introduced what we call
a File Server to store everyone’s files, so sharing files became
much easier. Pretty soon however, we needed more File Servers, one
or more for each function or department.
As we go further
into this digital world, digitizing anything and everything
possible, we create hundreds and thousands of files scattered in
hundreds of millions of PCs and servers, resulting in more and more
storage across many different types of network architectures. For
most computer users and organizations, our digital information is
becoming a lot like our garages before Spring cleaning: for some,
the garage just keeps getting crammed with more and more stuff, and
there is never any Spring cleaning because it’s just easier to leave
it alone than to face the daunting task of trying to sort through
all the junk.
Because of our own creation, finding
files and information within these undisciplined and unstructured
mountains of data is increasingly difficult. With or without our
realizing it, we are at a tipping point now: we need a better answer
to our increasing volume of digital files. Many people are trying
to provide solutions to this issue by using search engines—faster
and better search engines built into Operating Systems, but the
search approaches are just a short-term patch and do not address the
root causes—the conditions that have created the problem in the
first place.
So, what would a new and more
effective method of file storage look like, and how would it be
better than what we already have? What we have today is a totally
unstructured way of storing files anywhere we can find space for
them, and most of the time, we do not even fully understand where we
are saving the files, making it difficult to find them later. To
compound the problem, most of the files we are saving eventually
become obsolete or otherwise irrelevant, but nonetheless continue to
take up disk space. We save various versions and duplicates of files
that are outdated or irrelevant and never delete them. That occurs
over and over again because we have no way to identify the files
that we need from the ones we do not.
Policy-Based File Area Network
Above is our proposed high-level
diagram of a possible solution.
To my knowledge, there is little to
no evidence that we are anywhere close to solving this issue.
However, there are a few solutions in the works that are attempting
to address the issue. The most widely available but not very well
known solution is Microsoft’s Distributed File System (DFS), built
into the Windows 2000 & 2003 Operating System.
Microsoft’s DFS lays the foundation
for what could be richer features, functionalities, and better
architecture to come. It focuses on virtualization of the file
storage, provides fail-over and load-balance in a Wide Area Network
(WAN) environment, as well as some ability to centrally provision
and manage file storage architecture. Unfortunately, the existing
DFS still lacks many essential features and functionalities that
will make files more accessible and manageable, quickly and
transparently for users and IT alike.
We need
features and functionalities in the area of governmental and
organizational regulatory compliance filters, ways to eliminate
duplications, version control, file-type cost control, network-wide
instant keyword and content search engines, and more sophisticated
file migration and archiving, and we all need to comply with
governmental and organizational policies in this area.
By
Benson Yeung, Senior Partner
Benson Yeung Biography
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