Depending on performance requirements and underlying hardware, this chore can fall to such a granular level as to be heavily burdensome in both time and talent. The acronym is DAFS, for the Direct Access File System protocol. What sets DAFS apart is that it addresses the performance issue of network storage as well as management issues. That makes it difficult to implement over the Web, although a clever front-end server load balancing and switching infrastructure should be able to compensate. But even without it, I would never have dismissed network storage as a dead issue.
Evolution takes time.
In The Realm.