September 21

Remote Office Efficiency with Transparent Caching

“Remote” is a common term used today in the workplace. Whether it be a remote office or a single user at home, today’s technologies have given us the capability to virtually work from anywhere and be productive. But just how productive is your remote office?

Here’s a scenario…

You have a group of accountants that continually work on Excel spreadsheets that they access via a mapped drive. This mapped drive points to a server at the headquarters with a T1 connection (1.5Mbps). Today’s standard bandwidth requirement when connecting to servers locally is 1Gbps, so right away you can see where the inefficiencies would lie.

One solution that Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 can offer is Transparent Caching.

Same scenario with Transparent Caching Enabled

When the accountant opens the spreadsheet, the file is automatically cached on the local computer. At this point, you would not see a performance improvement because the file must first download across the 1.5Mbps link. It is not until the file is cached locally that you will see the optimal performance of transparent caching and get that local file experience.

Two-way background synchronization is configured so that the local file is transparently synchronized across the Wide Area Network (WAN) while you work on the local copy of the file. This means when you click “Save”, the file is saved locally then transparently uploaded to the server at a specified interval. No longer do you have to wait for the file to save across the 1.5Mbps link.

Deploying Transparent Caching

There are 4 major components of to getting Transparent Caching up and running, all of which can be controlled via Group Policy.

Here are the steps:

Enable Offline Files – This is enabled by default on Windows 7 but you have more control within the Group Policy Object (GPO).
Enable Transparent Caching
Enable and Configure Background Sync
Setup File Exclusions

Some key metrics to set can be found within the transparent caching and the Backup Sync GPO. In the Transparent Caching Settings, network latency triggers the caching function. Once the latency threshold is reached, files begin caching. This metric also triggers the background sync. The network is classified as a “slow link” and background syncing starts for the cached files that users are working on. When this occurs, the working file is located on the computer and background sync copies the file to the server at regular intervals.

This process accomplishes several things

Provides local speed and performance
Minimizes congestion and latency - Once the network latency returns to a point below the threshold, file reads are done from the server and the file is no longer cached.

In conclusion, by upgrading to the latest Windows OS and Server platform, Transparent Caching can be deployed. This is one of the many ways to improve the productivity of remote employees and could help dramatically reduce company costs by avoiding adding pricey bandwidth.