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Is there any method to copy 5GB of data from server systems to multiple clients systems in less time(max 2mins.) ? Data should be copied from server to all client systems.

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Generally it's possible in the right circumstances, but since you don't give any details, that's all one could say. What is the network architecture? Network speed? How many systems are involved? Kind of data? Operating systems? Important keyword: Multicasting. –  SvW Mar 2 '13 at 14:03
5GiB is a lot. Unless you have a fast connection, this is dificult. More so if there are several (how many?) clients. –  vonbrand Mar 2 '13 at 14:56
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closed as not a real question by SvW, Michael Hampton, Bryan, Ward, mdpc Mar 3 '13 at 4:47


3 Answers

Not with a traditional push copy from the server to the clients. This would need to be a pull/multicast. 5 Gbytes in two minutes is about 44 Mbytes per second, so that would require at a minimum gigabit network end-to-end.

Deploying big data in a short period of time is not unfeasible. Facebook Release Engineering for example, can push a 1.5 GB update to all of their servers within 15 minutes. They use Bittorrent. Or as Grant mentioned, using something like UDPCast for Windows.



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Yes. Use multicasting to just have to send the data once from the server. You still need a sufficiently fast network and hard drives in the server.

With multicasting it wont matter if there is 1 or 100 clients. Its commonly used by things like norton ghost or windows deployment services to reimage PCs. The server sends the data once and all clients receive it.

To copy 5GB in 2 minutes you need a transfer rate of just under 50MB/s. That is doable with a good gigabit network and fast hard drives.

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Unless all clients are mutually connected with gigabit networking, no, there isn't.

If they are so connected, then saturation of the server connection is your problem. Something like bittorrent is probably your best bet, where all clients becomes servers in their own right as soon as they've downloaded some part of the file that others don't yet have.

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