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?"

Comments

Not enough information.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hmm

[moogied]

Dedicated servers for each field office is out of the question, due to the price gouging of our outsourcing partner

Find a new partner.

Re:No Good Solution

[wish bot]

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.

Amazing

[obeythefist]

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.

So, here's your answer:

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.