The Distributed File System

One of the features in Windows 200x Server is the Distributed File System. This feature lets a domain manager take shared folders from other computers and "graft" them onto the server's own file system. I think a picture might explain this best. Figure 17.43 shows how a server has had shared folders grafted onto C:\Documents\public. The server now appears to have a folder at C:\Documents\public\brochures even though that directory resides in a shared folder on another computer. The Distributed File System detects that access to anything in folder C:\Documents\public\brochures really refers to \\sales\brochures.

Figure 17.43. The Distributed File System lets a Windows 200x Server administrator graft shared folders from elsewhere in the network into the server's own file system, building one virtual file system from several computers.

This becomes really interesting if this administrator shares the C:\documents folder, say, as \\bigserver\documents. Now, anyone on the network can access \\bigserver\documents\public\brochures. The server will invisibly have a remote user retrieve the file from the "grafted" folders without the user even knowing it.

Why is this capability useful? Well, it lets a network administrator build a server that is constructed of interchangeable parts. Bigserver could be the central server of a huge network, sharing millions of fileswith none of them actually stored on bigserver! Users would be able to come to one place to find resources, but the workload of serving all these files would be distributed among all the grafted file servers. And if one hard disk failed, it wouldn't take down the whole network. The administrator could simply graft in a replacement file server, instantly restoring service.

Finally, consider this: If every computer on your LAN shared its entire hard drive, and the network administrator grafted every one of these shares into a master folder, you would have a virtual file system containing every single file from every computer in your LAN.