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Creating a single, virtual drive from many network drives under Windows is not simple I am in search of a software utility that would manage shared drives over the network. It would be able to present a virtual drive that network clients could map to, although it would actually be comprised of multiple shared drives on the network. This would allow me to have multiple NAS [Network Attached Storage] devices that would appear to clients as a single drive. I don't want to directly map other clients to these drives because they may change and could eventually run out of drive letters, in addition to the fact that it would be confusing to someone searching for a file.
M. Willard Lori: I can understand the desire to obtain a utility for managing all your devices to ensure uptime for your users and lessen confusion on mapped drives. Fortunately, there are many solutions available for managing storage systems. First, I would suggest that you check in to some of the vendors, such as Veritas, Vixel, and Computer Associates, that offer software for managing storage devices. Some of these vendors offer solutions for managing network devices; however, it is hard to tell if they do exactly what you are requiring: appear as a single drive to users. Volume Manager from Veritas Software (www.veritas.com), a storage management software company, can manage devices from multiple vendors. I believe this solution runs for about $1,700. Another option you might try is SAN InSite 2000, device management software from Vixel. The product sells for approximately $3,000. Maybe Brooks has some hands-on experience in this area. What do you say, Brooks? Brooks: If you're determined to do NAS, I don't really have a good solution for you, assuming we're talking about a Windows platform here. What it really looks like you want is some sort of SMB (Server Message Block) redirection, which, to the best of my knowledge, just isn't possible within the SMB protocol. Microsoft's DFS (Distributed File Service) solution, called Distributed File System (Dfs), comes close. If you're hosting the storage on Windows NT Servers (or Windows 2000), you should look into Dfs. It's a free, downloadable add-on that does what you want, allowing clients to map to points in the DFS tree without having to know which physical server the drive resides on. Clients access the data using the \\dfs-tree\dfs-server\path\file name syntax. The path can be an arbitrary number of levels deep. Dfs, like so many of Microsoft's products, is frustrating because it almost seems great but turns out to be merely good. I've encountered some problems with it, especially for Windows 95 clients that do not have the Dfs client installed: They tend to crash when accessing an NT server that's running the tool (even if the client is not accessing a Dfs share per se). And by including the server name in the DFS UNC path, Microsoft gutted what could have been a cool fault-tolerant solution. The way I see it, multiple DFS servers should manage a DFS tree, with one advertising the tree name as a NetBIOS name on the network. If that server goes away, another server (presumably with replicated storage) would take over the advertisements. But because clients are asking for resources with the DFS server name, you are regretfully required to change to a backup server in the event the primary DFS server should go down. Microsoft's Dfs tool may be a good solution if it fits your needs and you are all-NT or can install the client on all of your Windows 95 machines. A different approach might be to create one large volume on an expandable, large SAN device, such as a Network Appliance system. You could add storage incrementally while leaving your clients with a single drive mapped. If you must use multiple, cheaper NAS devices, you can minimize the drive-letter clutter by using the UNC nomenclature in every application that supports it -- which is almost everything, these days. Of course, the UNC connections won't help you any when it comes time to juggle or remove NAS boxes, but at least that is better than nothing. Brooks Talley is senior business and technology architect for InfoWorld.com. Lori Mitchell is a senior analyst in the InfoWorld Test Center. Send your questions for them to testcenter_rx@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Network/System ManagementMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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