Is anyone using windows file shares in the cloud, if so what kind of performance are you getting?

[carl_townshend]

Hi All

Is anyone using windows file shares in the cloud, if so what kind of performance are you getting?

We are not having good experiences running trials for hosting windows shares in the cloud, no matter the speed of the link, and relatively low latency 30ms it still seems very slow.

Has anyone successfully done it and if so how? did you need to use WAN optimization, local caches etc?

cheers

[Deepak Kumar]

Hi,

I never tried it and never suggested to the client as well. I checked many support forums and community and everywhere found similar answer as:

"From my experience, using cloud services (either Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive...etc) as a file server results in unhappy users. Even with a good internet speed, I've seen offices the same size slow to a crawl. For MS Office documents, if you have the autosave feature turned on, the docs will save every few seconds which can generate a lot of traffic back and forth. Disable the autosave and you risk losing updates to your documents. Not to mention I've seen MS Word docs get pretty large (>20MB). Are you using other MS Office programs like Access? If you are those won't work well at all in this manner.

If you're looking to simplify your infrastructure, you could setup a NAS for your shared office documents, onsite backup repository...etc, and have the NAS backup to the cloud. But using cloud only as your file server for live has never worked out well for me.

What is possible is to use the cloud services to host your files and when you need a file, download it to your computer and once finished, upload back to the cloud. In this respect, services like SharePoint Online and the like can help a great deal in keeping version history, locking documents so other users know it has been "checked out" and being updated...etc.

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/759615-can-cloud-be-used-a-file-server-for-smb