We're a small, engineering R&D oriented company (35 employees), with 3 main offices (East Coast, West Coast, somewhere in the middle). Our IT is outsourced to a bunch of alien mutants with brains the size of peas, so we have some issues.
Site #1 is in the boonies on the East Coast. They can get T-1 internet service, and for the three people there, that should be OK.
Site #2 has 10 Mbps service to our outsourced IT company, who is well connected. Bandwidth is not an issue here.
Site #3 has T-1 service also. They have a dozen people working there, so the T-1 is a bit underpowered.
Our current network architecture is built on replicated servers at each location, plus one at the IT company. This gets a bit expensive, especially when the IT company has the absolute rule that they don't touch anything but "enterprise-y" hardware - servers and disks. Every priced 500 GB sized "Enterprise-y" hard disk upgrades? For four servers? When every server drive is mirrored?
Our biggest issue, though, is the replication process. All four file servers are expected to have identical content (give or take replication time). That means that if I update a file in my home directory on the server, it gets replicated (unnecessarily, IMHO) to the other three servers. As a practical matter, this means the T-1's feeding sites 1 and 2 are constantly full, replicating data that really doesn't need to be replicated.
In addition to this bandwidth issue, the replication product in use has caused us nothing but problems. Every week, we're dealing with broken replication, corrupted files, corrupted filesystems, broken backups, etc., all as a result.
I'm thinking there must be a simpler way. Is there any kind of solution out there where the remote sites could have a "caching proxy" for the Windows 2003 servers that we're using? I'm imagining a system where file requests that go to the proxy would get served from a disk cache, rather than getting served from a complete, up-to-date mirror of another server. This way, network traffic would be limited to files that are actually in use in the remote office.
The benefits would be many. We could save money on server licenses. We could save money on hard disks - there's no reason to mirror a cache, and only a central server would actually need large disks. The remote sites would only need disks big enough to cache the data/programs they are actually using. And would could save money by not having to continuously deal with the replication issues we're having.
Any thoughts?
/frank
Site #1 is in the boonies on the East Coast. They can get T-1 internet service, and for the three people there, that should be OK.
Site #2 has 10 Mbps service to our outsourced IT company, who is well connected. Bandwidth is not an issue here.
Site #3 has T-1 service also. They have a dozen people working there, so the T-1 is a bit underpowered.
Our current network architecture is built on replicated servers at each location, plus one at the IT company. This gets a bit expensive, especially when the IT company has the absolute rule that they don't touch anything but "enterprise-y" hardware - servers and disks. Every priced 500 GB sized "Enterprise-y" hard disk upgrades? For four servers? When every server drive is mirrored?
Our biggest issue, though, is the replication process. All four file servers are expected to have identical content (give or take replication time). That means that if I update a file in my home directory on the server, it gets replicated (unnecessarily, IMHO) to the other three servers. As a practical matter, this means the T-1's feeding sites 1 and 2 are constantly full, replicating data that really doesn't need to be replicated.
In addition to this bandwidth issue, the replication product in use has caused us nothing but problems. Every week, we're dealing with broken replication, corrupted files, corrupted filesystems, broken backups, etc., all as a result.
I'm thinking there must be a simpler way. Is there any kind of solution out there where the remote sites could have a "caching proxy" for the Windows 2003 servers that we're using? I'm imagining a system where file requests that go to the proxy would get served from a disk cache, rather than getting served from a complete, up-to-date mirror of another server. This way, network traffic would be limited to files that are actually in use in the remote office.
The benefits would be many. We could save money on server licenses. We could save money on hard disks - there's no reason to mirror a cache, and only a central server would actually need large disks. The remote sites would only need disks big enough to cache the data/programs they are actually using. And would could save money by not having to continuously deal with the replication issues we're having.
Any thoughts?
/frank
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