It wasn’t that long ago that people were only concerned with retaining their data and were much more comfortable with computer downtime. These days, it seems that everyone is impacted when the system goes down. Although there have been great advances to keep servers running at all times, it is impossible for anyone to guarantee that a server will stay up and running 100% of the time. Hard drives still fail, redundant systems can fail, tapes still fail, human errors in configuration and accidentally deleting files can cause downtime, and systems can become damaged by acts of God, man-made disasters, or theft.

The Distributed File System is a way to provide the highest level of file redundancy to your system. The bottom line is that if you have one file server running solo and it goes down, it could take an entire day for your computer administrator to put everything back together. A Distributed File System mirrors all of your files in real-time between two or more servers. The servers can even be housed at different locations. In the event that one server goes down, the system will automatically redirect users to the one server that is still running.

This can be beneficial for your Disaster Recovery Plan if you have more than one office. For example, if you have offices and Los Angeles and San Diego, and your Los Angeles office can no longer be used for operations due to a natural disaster, your staff can be moved to the San Diego office to continue working. All files will still be online even though one of your servers is down.