It’s easy to confuse secure file transfer servers with file servers. And it’s even easier to use “file server” for a broad category of devices that handle a number of different functions. Our goal in this post is to clarify what file servers are so that you can better understand the components of your architecture in the context of secure file transfer.
What is a file server?
A file server provides shared storage space for other computers on one or more networks. That storage space can be used for any number of purposes, but at its core, file servers are (relatively) straightforward machines with large memory volumes optimized for efficient data storage and retrieval.
What capabilities does a file server have?
A file server’s primary capability is to store and distribute data to a network. However, that simple task requires a number of specializations, including:
- Load balancing: The more traffic your organization receives, the more active your file servers will be. To keep up with demand, one of the primary capabilities file servers offer is load balancing. This feature allows your file server to distribute requests over a larger pool of system resources (such as duplicate machines) in order to balance responsiveness with available hardware.
- Data transfer speed: The faster your server can deliver data, the more efficient your network activity will be. Most file servers provide faster solid-state memory for caching actions that can pre-load more common requests more quickly to improve speed. Compression is another tool that can be utilized in order to reduce the total amount of data that must be transferred.
- Memory management: By nature of its role as the core storage space for your organization, your file server will be fine-tuned to manage large amounts of memory. These optimizations will include redundancy and virtualization tools such as disk arrays that group your server’s hard drives together into larger memory units (and spread out files across multiple hard drives for safety), Network-Attached Storage that has been specifically built for memory efficiency, compression tools to maximize available space and more.
- Security: Data security is paramount, and your file server will provide authentication tools and disk encryption options to prevent unauthorized access.
Does each server equal one machine?
Not necessarily. Machines can be “dedicated” to a single use as a file server, or be a portion of a machine that also performs other functions (“non-dedicated”), depending on your network needs.
Smaller organizations may be able to operate with a single machine serving a number of file server use cases we outline below. Cloud-based organizations will likely see their file server be hosted on a virtual machine that operates on a group of physical servers for redundancy purposes.
As your organization grows, you may choose to move toward a one server per machine set-up for ease of maintenance and administration, but every organization’s needs will be different. If you’re trying to keep costs down, operating fewer total machines may help accomplish that goal. If uptime and redundancy are important, having more servers operating and backing each other up may be the right solution.
What are the typical file server use cases?
File server use cases fall into three high-level buckets:
1. Communicating outside your organization
These file servers include web and email servers, as well as secure file transfer servers like Cerberus FTP Server by Redwood. In all cases, these file servers are handling client data requests and enabling the transmission of data from your organization to the outside world. These file servers generally offer transmission encryption and authentication services, as well as support for data visualization protocols. Not all allow data to be transferred onto your file server, however.
Inbound email, website forms and file transfers all add data to your file server, and are facilitated by a number of operations on your network and server to ensure that the data is trusted and stored in a safe location.
2. Facilitating network traffic
While technically not a true file server, one of the more important jobs of your servers is to direct traffic throughout your network. This may be accomplished by a combination of the file servers listed above, which are listening for traffic on their specified ports, and other servers that are dedicated to functions like load balancing, proxying, translating domain names via DNS and configuring network settings.
These critical functions can be divvied up across your available hardware in any number of ways, with specific configurations dictated by your operational, security and traffic requirements.
3. Storing data
Once data reaches your network and is deemed safe, it needs a place to live. Most organizations dedicate a file server for this purpose and build its specifications based on the expected capabilities above.
We hope this post has helped you better understand the differences between file servers. If you are running into any challenges configuring your file servers to work with Cerberus FTP Server, please contact our support team and we’ll be happy to help.