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

Global file system

[Colin Smith]

Such as OpenAFS.

Something like coda might be nicer but progress on global filesystems seems to have pretty much stalled.

No Good Solution

[maz2331]

There is no good and cheap solution to this one.

You can try the application accelerators that are out there now from Cisco. They basically use smoke and mirrors to keep traffic off the WAN and act as local proxies for different services.

Otherwise, your choices are limited. Citrix servers would be good for some apps, but get god-awful expensive fast. And an organization too cheap to build out a decent system to begin with isn't likely to make the investment in writing efficient apps.

If you're running on slow lines, bump them to at least fractional T3.

It sounds like the system was designed to serve 5 gallons of water through a swizzle stick. Ain't gonna work unless something is radically changed.

Or better....

Fire the outsourcing partner and the management that buys their bull, and build out a proper distributed archetecture.

Re:No Good Solution

[chappel]

I was really impressed with the improvements we got by implementing some 'smoke and mirrors' from Riverbed (http://www.riverbed.com/). Granted, we've got some reasonably adequate bandwidth to start with, but it dropped the WAN traffic to our large (500 user) remote site by a good 80%. They seemed mighty expensive for a plain dell server with CentOS, but there's no arguing with results. /reminds self to look into riverbed stock

Re:No Good Solution

[eazeaz]

We use riverbed appliances at all our remote offices. They take about an hour to install and are damn near like magic. I just pulled some statistics from one of our remote offices. Over the last 30 days, we had a reduction in data flow of 95% 6.3GB of data went over the T1 instead of 129.3GB We can run applications over a T1 and users do not know that they are not local. They allowed us to go from DS-3 to T1 lines without any user complaints.

Too little too late

[armada]

I suggest you pay more attention to the data itself. Do an comprehensive and brutaly unbiased audit of what data/resources are needed by whom. You would be amazed at how much of your infrastructure is either superfulous or capricious. Once you do this then you at least have a smaller mountain to climb.