[ExI] Techie question: best/fastest WAN file system solution

[Samantha Atkins]

One thing that I grapple with a lot is how i/we can use network  
resources efficiently in at least small steps towards extending our  
brains via hardware and the network.   One aspect of this is looking  
for and using the most efficient means of having the equivalent of  
fast dependable cloud data storage and retrieval. By this I mean  
network file system equivalents fully useable by any tools that access  
filesystems.   It is very important to me and I imagine a lot of folks  
to be able to access our persistent bits from wherever we are given a  
network connection.   I have looked at WebDAV, both on my own linux  
server and the Mac iDisk.  Pretty slow, especially for browsing  
reasonable sized directories of information and opening PDF and media  
docs.  Hell, any kind of document save, even small ones, is a bit  
tedious.  I tried sshfs but it is if anything a bit slower in my  
experience thus far.  Something that automatically cached locally  
might be better (the iDisk does some of that).  I haven't pulled out  
NFS as my very dated opinion is that it isn't secure enough.  I have  
used various offerings that use the Amazon cloud S3 data.  None of  
those to date were better than WebDAV.

What do other people use that they think well of?   I would prefer  
open solutions but am not totally adverse to putting some money into a  
superior solution.

- samantha