Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How Would You Make a Distributed Office System?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the ip-over-avian-carriers dept.

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?"

3 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No Good Solution by chappel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  2. Too little too late by armada · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "This message was sent from an Apple //GS"
  3. Re:No Good Solution by eazeaz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.