Whilst storage capacities ever increase and the pressure of the amount of data requiring to be stored increases along side, Numerica has been implimenting SAN and NAS technologies.  Whilst this sorts out the capacity side of networking accessing this data has always been via our front end servers using the traditional UNC connections ie \\servername\share.  Therefore we have implimented Microsoft DFS. Although DFS has been around since Windows 2000 our first attempts are its use with replication brought our wide area links to thier knees and so was abandond.

The Windows 2003 implimentation seems much improved.  Using a NAS box with Windows 2003 Storage Server we have implimented Domain wide DFS (published to Active Directory) and established DFS roots by discipline.  ie \\DomainName\Discipline. This means that we dont have to worry about which server has what on.  We can enable multiple local linked replica servers for load balancing and if we move applications between servers or need to take a server offline for maintenance systems are still online and accessable.