Identifying Business-Critical File Servers

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

After you plan for file server uptime, identify file servers that must be highly available. These file servers typically contain business-critical data that is required for an organization’s central purpose, such as software distribution points, e-mail or business databases, and internal or external Web sites. File servers need to be highly available for the following reasons as well:

  • The file server contains one or more stand-alone DFS roots. If you create a stand-alone DFS root on a file server, and the server fails or is taken offline for maintenance, the entire DFS namespace is unavailable. Users can access the shared folders only if they know the name of the file servers where the shared folders are located. To make stand-alone DFS namespaces fault tolerant, you can create the roots on clustered file servers.

  • Your organization is consolidating file servers. Consolidation leads to a greater dependency on fewer file servers, so you must ensure the availability of the remaining file servers.

  • Your organization has existing SLAs. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Organization Level Agreements (OLAs) specify the required uptime for file servers, usually defined as the percentage of time that the file server is available for use. For example, your organization might require that file servers have 99.7-percent uptime regardless of the type of data they contain. To meet these agreements, some organizations deploy clustered file servers and assign experienced administrators to manage those file servers. In addition to deploying hardware, these administrators use defined and tested processes to fulfill these agreements.

You do not need to implement additional availability strategies on file servers that store temporary or non-business-critical files. For example, if the file server fails in some way, but users can tolerate the loss of the file server for the time it takes to repair the file server or restore the data from backup, you do not need to use an availability strategy such as replication or clustering. Instead, you can work to decrease the amount of time it takes to restore the file server.