We are having more than 60 Branch office locations and a centralized Datacenter and DR Site. All the end user computing services like AD, Exchange, DHCP, Antivirus etc. are being centralized and in that process, File Services and FTP Servers which are currently residing in Branch office locations, need to be centralized.
Current Setup:
File & FTP Servers are based on Windows Server 2003. No DFS. Shared Folders mapped as Network Drives or Home folders to the users. Manual work and no redundancy or replication involved.
Desired Setup:
Centralized File and FTP Services based on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012. Redundancy should be there so that there is no disruption to the Services. Bandwidth is not a concern to be enhanced between Branch Office and Datacenter sites.
Please suggest the approach to be adopted and what factors to be considered while designing the File and FTP Services so that it becomes a robust design. You can ask me for any further clarifications on this.
Regards,
K Phani Kumar