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It should come as no surprise that a company that develops refrigeration technology would have a
special appreciation for a tool that "freezes" files to facilitate efficient collaboration among
its corps of engineers.
Kysor/Warren (Kysor), headquartered in Columbus, GA, has been providing refrigeration solutions to the supermarket
industry for more than 100 years. They are a leading manufacturer of frozen, medium temp and heated
display merchandisers, mechanical refrigeration systems and remote mechanical and electrical enclosures.
Kysor has roughly 350 users, at four locations, with customer support and sales reps scattered across the country.
Their two main engineering groups operate at two different locations. Both groups use the same AutoCAD
and Excel file sets, which naturally presented several fundamental challenges, the first of which was
to find a way to allow the group at the remote site to pull massive amounts of data across a WAN
connection without putting a massive hit on network performance. Network administrators Marcell
Conley, Romeo Byll and Philip Alexander collectively decided to implement Microsoft DFS Replication
to reduce traffic on the WAN link AND to improve performance at the remote site. However, they soon
found that moving to MS DFS caused major issues with document control, as there was no way to prevent
users from simultaneously working on the very same file, causing version conflict, resulting in
confusion and unacceptable project delays.
While MS DFS Replication has been broadly embraced to facilitate replication across remote sites,
it has clear shortcomings in today's more fluid, collaborative environments such as Kysor’s,
where data needs to be shared in real-time, between remote sites and two engineering teams.
As Kysor’s IT team soon found out, DFS lacks file locking; without integrated file locking,
using DFS to mirror file servers exposed live documents to version conflicts, as there is no
way to prevent a colleague in Office A from opening and editing a document at the same time
a colleague in Office B is working on the same document. In such a scenario, DFS will only
save the changes made by the person closing the file last. Moreover, Kysor found what many
using DFS quickly learn: version conflict can and often will arise even if these two colleagues
are not editing the file simultaneously.
To address this critical shortcoming, Kysor’s IT group selected Peer Software’s PeerLock product,
the only true stand-alone file locking solution on the market offering real-time detection of
file use and immediate remote locking. PeerLock’s core functionality ensures that when a user
is modifying a file, no other user will be allowed to make changes to that file on any machine
that the user has chosen to lock (files can be locked on any location even if the location is on
a different domain). Alexander, Conley and Byll tested and implemented PeerLock at multiple
locations. For evaluation process, the Kysor team set up two servers with MS Server 2003 R2
and DFS. Performance benchmarks were established using network monitoring and trending software.
PeerLock was then loaded on the servers and configured. Performance tests were ran against the
benchmarks.
"We sent a couple of questions to the PeerLock Forum regarding exclusions by file type,
which were answered quickly," said Alexander. "Setup and configuration was very easy.
The Peerlock program was installed on each of the servers. The servers were then restarted.
PeerLock was started and activation keys entered. Configuration was simply a matter of pointing
the PeerLock software toward the local and remote DFS directories. It began working immediately."
For instance, Zamudio can replicate their financial
images every 15 minutes, but have a backup that is
blacked out from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. He can also have
data backups from their remote servers that only replicate
changes to existing files, further controlling bandwidth
usage.
As Kysor’s IT group attests, the surest and simplest way of eliminating version
conflicts when using DFS is to add a true file locking solution - one that offers,
at a minimum, real-time detection of file use and immediate remote locking, such as PeerLock.
This assures that when a file is open at location A, all other versions - say local copies at
various branch offices - are locked down, preventing anyone from opening and revising it.
When the file closes, the file lock is immediately released and ready for synchronization.
Alexander and his colleagues presented their findings and recommendations to their Director.
"The decision to implement Peerlock was pretty clear-cut.
Simply put, it gave us better document control with little or no impact on network performance.
DFS with PeerLock is an ideal solution for any organization that relies on efficient, seamless
collaboration."
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