Together, these components enable data availability in the case of failure or heavy load by allowing shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, the "DFS root".
It is also called "MS-DFS" or "MSDFS" in some contexts, e.g. in the Samba user space project.
[2] There is no requirement to use the two components of DFS together; it is perfectly possible to use the logical namespace component without using DFS file replication, and it is perfectly possible to use file replication between servers without combining them into one namespace.
Windows Server 2003 R2 introduced "DFS Replication" (DFSR) which improves on FRS by only copying those parts of files which have changed (remote differential compression), by using data compression to reduce network traffic, and by allowing administrators flexible configuration options for limiting network traffic with a customizable schedule.
Linux kernels 2.6.14 and later[6] come with an SMB client VFS called "cifs" that supports DFS.