Third Party replication solution?

[Bob Smedley]

We have a situation where DFS/FRS really does not meet our needs. I was
wondering if anyone knew of any third party software that would.

We have multiple offices in multiple sites which need to share files. The
sites are connected via T1 lines. The files can be large in size (many are
over 100MB) so we can't just map shares across the WAN since load times
would be too long. We would like to be able to have copies of the files on
each site with changes being replicated to all other sites. However, rather
than copy the entire file (as DFS does) we need to only copy the changes to
the file since we need the T1 bandwidth for other network traffic. Also, we
need to be able to let users know when someone else is using a file so we
need to replicate file locks (which DFS doesn't do).

In summary, we need:
* Replication to multiple sites across T1 connections
* Byte level replication - not file level
* Replication of file locks to prevent users overwriting their changes.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[Carl Appellof]

I work on a product called VERITAS Storage Replicator
(http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDetail.jhtml?productId=stor
agereplicatornt) that is capable of replicating "just the changes" after
doing an initial synchronization to replicate the entire files' contents
(you can't replicate changes if you don't have a base to start from.)
However, it won't do 2-way update. One system is always designated as the
source (master), and other systems are designated as targets (slaves).
Files are read-only on the target while replication is going on. And for
continuous ("just the changes") replication, it is ALWAYS going on.

Carl