Centralising and managing user data

Just after 8am on the morning after the attendee party and as you can guess this session was not well attended. That was a shame as it was very good.

The two presenters are part of the Windows File team and had done some work internally at MS to centralise and manage data of users on this pilot.

Aims:

1. 99.99% availability (less than 5 mins a year downtime in their environment)
2. Near local access times, regardless of the location of user/data
3. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero data loss for the central location
4. Single backup server
5. Selective file/folder restore by end user.
6. Same view of files wherever the user logs on

Technologies leveraged:

• 10Gb quota per user
• Folder redirection and offline file cache
• Backups via SCDPM
• Windows 7 - when user logs on first time, files are moved to local offline cache then synced with server transparently. This is better than previous versions of Windows which blocked access to desktop until files copied up to server and then back to local offline cache.
• Slowlink mode in Windows 7 - detects when link is slow and makes user work locally then syncs when Lan/Wan is better
• SMB 2.1 - better Oplock model so client can sleep (Office uses oplocks and would stop computers sleeping unnecessarily.
• File System Resource Manager (FSRM) - quotas, allowed file types, periodic or on demand reporting to see storage trends etc
• File Classification Infrastructure - assesses how files are used long term, can choose to compress, or tie into Hierarchial Storage Management (HSM)
• Shadow copy for shared folders - allows users to be self sufficient in restoring previous file versions (they have to be online to recover).
• Policies/GPO

All the demos worked smoothly to prove it. We are doing some similar things with our solution, such as shadow copy, backups in data centre. Here is a great example of how we can take this forward, particularly for roaming users - why should my data be tied to ISB, if MTO can provide a much better service in every location; rather than good service in ISB but shocking elsewhere?

Again one to consider for the roadmap.