On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Jeremy Charles <jchar...@epic.com> wrote: > 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.
At $lastjob for small remote offices, we used the Riverbed's "PFS" offering that stored CIFS data on the Riverbed, and it auto-synced everything back to a upstream hub for backups, etc... The upstream replica was to be considered "read-only" but it helped for controlling access and keeping things saner. For really remote offices on other continents, we shipped them a half rack with 3 physical servers, vmware, a small iSCSI storage array, tape drive, switch, riverbed, UPS, router, etc...... One setup, the remote office had a small enterprise setup for file, print, mail, backup, and AD redundancy. We had a ton of little offices everywhere, so sharding resources per-site was common place and something our users were used to dealing with. That said, there were some common shares that really needed to be in many places at once. We were looking at DFSr to handle those issues, but locking issues and the "last write wins" policy of DFSr were making people a little nervous about using it on data looked at by executive level folks. HTH, -n -- ------------------------------------------- nathan hruby <nhr...@gmail.com> metaphysically wrinkle-free ------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ 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/
