http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/inetpub/kevinremde/KROmniture.htmMany of you reading my blog are responsible for not only your local users and network and IT infrastructure, but also for supporting those poor folks who work remote branch offices. And I say “poor folks” in the context of their access to the documents and applications that they would like quicker access to; because those are housed in the main office or at the corporate H.Q. Those poor people probably have a WAN connection over the Internet that connects them to the stuff they need to do. So.. even though they’re potentially working on the same web applications or the same documents as their local coworkers at the Scranton Branch, each time they have to work on that corp-based document requires the file to go across the slow WAN connection. And that takes time and wastes bandwidth.
But in Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft introduced technology called BranchCache. With it, your branch office workers are likely to have local, automatically cached copies of the documents or applications they frequently use. And it can be as automatic as using the PCs themselves to maintain the cached copies, or by setting up servers to maintain them. But in either case, your branch office users won’t have to know or care about that. All they’ll notice is that the file that usually took them 10-15 seconds to open is now there almost immediately.
Today’s “31 Days of our Favorite Things” author is Brian Lewis. He’s going to expand upon and explain BrancheCache, and how it has been improved upon in Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8.
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Care to share your impressions of or experiences with BranchCache? Got a tip or a question? That’s what the comments are for.
Absolutely Full of I.T. 