Wide area file services technology helps firm consolidate and more easily share files with remote offices

Johanna Ambrosio spoke with Aaron Wetherhold about the implementation of wide area file services at his company, Architectural Testing. This is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.

Hi. I'm Johanna Ambrosio, and welcome to ITworld Voices. Today, we're talking with Aaron Wetherhold. Aaron is System Administrator at Architectural Testing. His firm makes sure that windows, doors, and other building products are up to snuff. A few months ago the company implemented wide area file services. The goal was to help its six regional offices and headquarters consolidate and more easily share files. Aaron will talk about what lead to this decision and how it's been working out.

Johanna Ambrosio: Hi Aaron. Thank you for joining us today.

Aaron Wetherhold: Hello.

Ambrosio: I was wondering if you could tell us about your overall IT environment. What are your major applications, server, and other infrastructure?

Wetherhold: Sure. We have a corporate office in York, Pennsylvania that has about 150 employees, and we have 6 regional offices spread out throughout the country that have anywhere from 5 to 30 employees at each office. Our main application is file and print. We share a lot of files between the offices, and that's mainly what we're interested in tying our offices together with.

Ambrosio: Okay. So, I'm wondering what was going on that prompted a need for a wide area file service? Was there a specific driver related to either business or technology?

Wetherhold: Definitely. What we found was that moving files was slow across the LAN. We have a VPN set up that goes across the Internet, and we found that moving files was slow. But more than moving files, opening files and especially browsing folders was extremely slow to the point where we found that our end users really just avoided it at all costs. If they could avoid sharing files or accessing a file on another system, they would. They would do everything they could. Sometimes they would even send emails to the other office saying 'hey, can you please search for these files?'

Wetherhold: As we were getting larger and larger, more offices were coming online, and more of a need to share data between offices, we found that this was becoming a real hindrance to our business application. We found that there was usually a need to go in and see files between the various locations, and with that obstacle in the way, we needed to solve it somehow.

Ambrosio: Okay. So, how long ago was the system implemented and how is it working?

Wetherhold: We implemented the system roughly three months ago.

Ambrosio: And what are you using?

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