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How Would You Make a Distributed Office System?
Necrotica writes "I work for a financial company which went through a server consolidation project approximately six years ago, thanks to a wonderful suggestion by our outsourcing partner. Although originally hailed as an excellent cost cutting measure, management has finally realized that martyring the network performance of 1000+ employees in 100 remote field offices wasn't such a great idea afterall. We're now looking at various solutions to help optimize WAN performance. Dedicated servers for each field office is out of the question, due to the price gouging of our outsourcing partner. Wide area file services (WAFS) look like a good solution, but they don't address other problems, such as authenticating over a WAN, print queues, etc. 'Branch office in a box' appliances look ideal, but they don't implement WAFS. So what have your companies done to move the data and network services closer to the users, while keeping costs down to a minimum?"
Financial. Liability.
Financial companies, at least in my State, have very specific requirements for storing and transmitting data. Without knowing what your specific needs are, I have no answer other than "Define your problem".
The reality is other companies, such as yourself, exist and function probably better. If that indeed is the case, perhaps a friendly lunch with another IT staff member might help you.
I've consolidated offices and I've also pushed out servers to remote offices. It all depends on the need of the client. Examples
1. Client wanted 99.999% uptime and the only way I could get that was to have their servers in a data center. We moved them and uptime has been great.
2. Client wanted fast file access. We setup DFS with WIndows 2003 over a WAN link (T1) the client has never been happier.
So, to answer your question, it depends on your needs.
Find a new partner.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
He should tell us who their outsourced partner is. This sounds very similar to a strategy I'm hearing about for our company right now.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Some basic truths.
IT costs money. I'm sorry that your outsourcer had some bad ideas. But your management must understand that IT services aren't free, and the health of your company depends on it's infrastructure.
Without knowing the specifics, the only low cost suggestion I can provide is converting desktop PC's into Linux servers, thus providing you with the distributed server network you need. Of course, the boxes will be underpowered and fall over all the time (yay desktop hardware), but if you really want to cut costs, there you have it. For backups, put in extra hard disk and backup to disk, it beats nothing at all.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Dedicated servers for each field office is out of the question ... such as authenticating over a WAN, print queues, etc
Print queues over WAN is taking the consolidation thing a little to the extreme, isn't it? Login authentications and print jobs really want to be local. Sorry about your predicament but you're going to get a lot of comments telling you to switch outsourcers or bite the bullet on their prices. What is the other traffic (as if that isn't bad enough): one assumes email, but are there big apps hosted on remote servers with lots of data traffic to db servers and the like? Simple document file sharing shouldn't be that much of a problem, or is it? You're going to get a lot of guesses without knowing the exact needs of your remote traffic. Good luck!
and eating it too? Is it just me, or is this one of those situations where upper management makes a design decision from something they glanced over in some IT mag, then decided to implement without consulting anyone with any IT background?
I don't see how you can create an insanely diffuse network, then turn around and expect it to perform like a network that has a centralized "HQ" with file services etc and a fat WAN connection.
Of course, you could just ask the execs to spring for ~100 WAN accelerators... =)
The only responsible answer to this question is to get someone in that has a track record of fixing problems like this. Don't expect to get a reasonable answer from a sketchy problem definition in a place like slashdot.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'd mod parent up if I had the points...
Yes fire the damn outsourcing partner. They obviously did not have your needs in mind when they suggested it. Most likely they thought they could save themselves money by having 1 location they have to go to when shit goes wrong.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Either consolidate your servers, or don't.
Exactly what costs were you thinking of saving by consolidating? If it's just the cost of building and maintaining those physical servers, then here is the cold, hard truth: You are paying less for less service. Put servers at each branch office if you'd rather pay more for more service.
You get what you pay for.
Now, if it's other problems that are keeping you from setting up those dedicated boxes, realize that these are other problems. Identify them, and bring them back to Ask Slashdot. We're Slashdot, we're not psychic.
If it's your outsourcing partner gouging prices, dump them for an outsourcing partner which doesn't gouge prices, or do it in-house.
If it's the inability to manage all those servers, get them to talk to each other, etc, that's a more interesting technical problem that Slashdot might be able to help solve.
There are a few exceptions -- you might be able to get away with something like Coda or AFS, though I don't know how well that scales to crappy bandwidth. But if so, that would imply that your only problem is managing strictly filesystem data -- it doesn't help at all if the problem is access to, say, an intranet webapp. So again, we need details, if we are to find the clever exceptions.
Otherwise, upgrade your bandwidth, and/or outsource your actual application servers to someone who can scale. If it's just web/email/docs, Google can do that. Otherwise, find someone who specializes in what you're doing (our SVN is run by cvsdude.com), or bite the bullet and buy some virtual servers.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
WSUS servers out at all locations is fairly costly as it requires a decent server and Win2K3. That could be a lot of extra hardware and licenses to buy/support. Unless your company needs to run full bandwidth 24/7, just schedule your updates for the middle of the night and it doesn't matter there is only one server pushing it out. I currently do this for my company that has 30 branches, half overseas, and all on slower connections than I would like. Windows Updates are the lowest bandwidth concern of mine now, because they happen once a month and when no one is even around to notice.
... seems to be that your oursourcing partner has you on the Merry-Go-Round. They work it like this...
1. Propose a WAN-based solution.
2. When that slows to a crawl, propose a branch server solution.
3. When that proves to be too expensive to administer, propose a centralized solution.
4. When that proves to be difficult, unproductive, or slow, propose a branch office solution with accelerators, DFS, and all the goodies.
5. When that proves too expensive to administer, propose a thin client/remote app solution.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 as needed, substituting current technology for at least three iterations.
7. If you still have this client, you may now feel free to propose ANYTHING, including cans and string, or gerbils. They will buy it. Change your technical onsite staff every 6 months, rotating in fresh and untrained candidates. Rotate out those who show promise to be re-deployed at newer clients who are at step 4 or earlier in the process.
It's kinda sad. Consulting outfits can rarely make a living by doing right for a large client. Sooner or later, they either get replaced when the client starts 'analysing' the operation, or get replaced when some other outfit has a stronger line of bull to offer management.
Of course, there's incompetence, but my former boss isn't involved. He's busy screwing people in a different business, when he's not busy screwing his employees.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Or, more likely they have A solution. It doesn't matter what the problem is, they are going to shoehorn their one solution in to fit it.
You can't have "servers" and "no servers" at the same time, regardless of what the vendor says.
If the "consolidation" is a done deal, I'd suggest moving to well-behaved web apps hosted at your data center, and making sure that you have Service Level Agreements with the network provider(s) that contain actual, enforceable standards and painful penalties for not meeting them for all the branch office network connections.
It's all money. Some things cost, others save. Consolidating servers saves money, the required SLAs for the now-mandatory reliable, high-performance networking costs money.
Just remember that no matter what you pick, in a few years everybody will tell you that it's crap and you need something else. Since it's inception, the computer industry has gone though several cycles of centralized/decentralized computing and storage, and shifted various percentages of processing, storage and UI back and forth between where the resources are and where the user is.
As long as there's a buck to be made, it will never stop.
If you look at actual business requirements, there is still very little that couldn't be done with a dumb terminal, or with it's friendlier child, the web browser, except make money for the vendors.
I do consulting for a number of mid-size companies that are still using ancient (1980's) technology for core business processes and there's really no compelling business case for them to change. A number of really large businesses still run on an ancient core of COBOL.
If the vendor says "You'll save money", tell them you'll jump right in as soon as they post a performance bond for the full amount. I'll bet you never hear from them again.