That is, a file or volume can reside on any file server within a cell. This approach has two advantages. Transparent file migration is one advantage. An administrator can migrate a volume from a busy server to an idle server to balance load. The name of the file within the volume does not change when the volume migrates.
Transparent replication is another advantage.
An administrator can replicate a popular volume on several file servers to distribute access. Thus, server load and document availability can be improved without changing any document pointers or URLs. 2.3 File Caching Wide-area file systems use an aggressive file caching policy to reduce the network load and access latency. When a user accesses a file, the wide-area file system first checks the local cache for a copy of the file. The access patterns associated with information browsing exhibit less temporal locality than traditional file access patterns.