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New Concept in File Saving

The basic idea is simple. Every time a file is written, the changed portion of the file(not the entire file) are also saved immediately across the network to another system in a remote location. At any given time, there are always two live, active copies of the file in two separate locations.

Advantages

• With the NFS and CIFS protocol as the transport layer, there is no need to re-invent the wheel with a proprietary protocol.
• Only one copy of software is needed,  on the active system. The NFS infrastructure on the remote system takes care of all replication operations from the active system.
• The two systems can be at geographically-dispersed locations, separated by hundreds of miles.
• The MFS works with any remote system and NAS that supports NFS and CIFS.
• The MFS works with any type of local and remote storage devices.
• NFS and CIFS check the syntax and semantics of every replication operation (create, write, delete) to maintain the integrity of the file system.
• Files on the remote system are ready to be used immediately.
• The file systems on both systems are active. When failover occurs, there is no need for file system check and mount operations.
• Using file system like NFS and CIFS to do the replication, only changed portion of a file as unit of block need to be replicated to remote system. This saves a lot of system resources and network bandwidth.