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1.6 Applicability Statement

  • Article

The DFS: Referral Protocol is applicable for scenarios in which files that are stored across one or more shares— possibly including one or more file servers—and the share administrator would like to provide one or more of the following capabilities.

  • A unified namespace across multiple shares, such that from a client's perspective there is no need to know about individual share namespaces.

  • A fault-tolerant namespace, such that failure of a share causes the client to fail over to an alternate share.

  • A geographically optimized namespace, such that the client will automatically access the share that contains the geographically "lowest cost" copy of the files.

  • A share name that is logically independent of the file server or the actual name of the share on the file server.