I'd like to hear from those who have had to manage IT resources for offices that are located on opposite sides of oceans.
Our primary challenge right now is this: Our original offices, and our CIFS file servers, are located in Wisconsin, USA. We also have an office in the Netherlands. The folks in the Netherlands interact heavily with files on the CIFS file servers in Wisconsin - as does the entire company. Performance was understandably painful for the Netherlands folks until we added a Riverbed system to optimize the CIFS traffic. It's better now, but the Netherlands folks are still pointing out productivity losses due to slowness working with the CIFS file servers. Note that the link between the Netherlands and Wisconsin offices has never been strained for capacity - this purely seems to be a latency issue. One of the obvious thoughts is to set up file servers (and backups) in the Netherlands office, and move "their" files over to "their" file servers. Of course, there is no clear division between what the Wisconsin folks use and what the Netherlands folks use, so somebody will always be the winner and somebody will always be the loser when it comes to performance in accessing a particular piece of data. It's also worth noting that we may have one or more other office(s) popping up in the eastern hemisphere at some point. If we add a file server and backups to each office to store each office's most heavily utilized data, we'll end up with a lot of systems to manage. (Yes, we've thought of renting space in a data center that's a reasonable compromise location among the eastern hemisphere offices - wherever they end up being.) Is our best bet to simply try to locate data closest to the people who use it the most (and set expectations accordingly with those who are not near a given piece of data), or is there a better way to deal with this? === Jeremy Charles Epic - Computer and Technology Services Division jchar...@epic.com Phone: 608-271-9000 Fax: 608-271-7237 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
