Today's enterprises operate around the globe, 24/7. It used to be enough to have sufficient bandwidth to connect your R&D building to your factory. Today, it’s just as important to connect Munich to Detroit or Santa Clara to Bangalore. People in your remote sites need to be connected with the same access to files as their counterparts at headquarters.

Most industries rely on highly distributed work forces located around the world. And in sectors like engineering, manufacturing, architecture and design, the file sizes for projects are enormous. A typical engineering drawing can easily be several hundred megabytes in size. In the world of semiconductor design or software development, file sizes can be several gigabytes.

Since files that large cannot be shared quickly or easily over WANs, most companies end up maintaining multiple file systems, with one located in each design center or engineering office. This makes revision control risky and challenging. Consequently most design applications offer several ways to manage this issue, including PDM applications, layers of revision control, file vaults, or other mechanisms that basically reduce the risk of the same file being edited by two users at the same time. Improper revision control can lead to very expensive, or even irreversible, mistakes.

By deploying Steelhead appliances in remote offices and major design centers, it is possible to maintain a single set of master files that can be accessed from very distant offices. By maintaining one set of centralized authoritative data, the possibility of a mistake is exceedingly low. If one user tries to open a file that is in use, the file system will take care of that by notifying the second user that the file is in use but able to open as read only, just as if the two users were in the same room. Both users receive the full Riverbed acceleration for accessing the file across the WAN.

To find out more, download the Windows File Sharing Performance Brief.