[Samba] Ideas for distributed Samba servers

[Eric Shubert]

Robert LeBlanc wrote:
> I'm trying to think about how to setup a Samba system and would like to pick
> the brains of some experts. We are looking up put a large amount of storage
> ~75TB in a central data center. We have some remote (ok, not remote, but
> across slower links, ok if you consider several hundred clients over 1Gb to
> be slow) locations that we would like to set up samba servers that 'cache'
> the file system and serve it up to the clients in the building and sync with
> the main data center storage. The idea is have a couple of TB that are
> located in the building that serve up the Samba share. When a client
> requests a file, if it's in the local cache it is served up from there, if
> not then the Samba server grabs the file from the main data center and
> serves it to the client. When a file is written, something like rsync is
> used to transfer only difference back to the main data center. The problem
> is that I'm not sure of a file system that does this. We are using Lustre on
> our HPC, but this won't do what we want.
> 
> Any suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Robert LeBlanc
> Life Sciences & Undergraduate Education Computer Support
> Brigham Young University

I'm curious to know what you came up with for this. Care you share?
TIA.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'