We have what we believe to be a very common problem but are having trouble coming up with a solid answer. In our production Windows web environment we have 4 redundant public-facing web servers. Content changes are done on an internal-only web server and should be immediately available on the front end servers. Currently we achieve this through CA Arcserve, which seems to work well except for when it doesn't (bugs/crashing/misconfiguration/etc?)
In our unix environment we use a clustered file system (veritas), to achieve this, and are considering switching our windows environment to use the same technology.
What are the common solutions to this problem? Are there writeups of tradeoffs between using clustering technology versus replication technology? What are the most commonly used solutions in other enterprises?
Assuming these servers are all in the same Windows AD forest, and you can handle up to a few seconds delay from a file being closed, you have a perfect use case for Microsoft DFS Replication.
If you really need truly immediate updates for some very strange reason, then you will need a real clustered and distributed file system that does multi-phase commit between all the replicas. Note that this will make write performance as slow as your slowest server and link.