Questions about off site servers

[rachel.137779]

We are considering co-locating to an offsite server location. Wondering if anyone has any experiences, if so what areas of concern should we look into? ie latency, bandwidth, license manager and templates on network?

If you have co-located what size bandwith pipe between locations did you use?

Thanks in advance

[Glenn Pope]

what areas of concern should we look into? ie latency, bandwidth, license manager and templates on network?
All of them.

Your going to need a big pipe. For comparison, a typical LAN will have 100Mb to 1Gb (1000Mb) connection. A DSL connection usually maxes out around 6Mb. If you can get fiber optic or a T3, then that can be around 45 to 50Mb.

We have a DSL connection that we use if we need access to the server at the other office. This is painfully slow and pretty much useless. Its quicker to just drive the 1 hour to the other office and copy what we need to a usb drive and come back.

I can see the advantages of having an off site server that all your offices can connect to. But in practice the time I end up just sitting and waiting for a file to open or save just never seemed worth it.

Tho this all depends on the size if files you normally will have. If your files never get past more then a 1MB, then its not that bad. For us, we usually have files that can get to several MBs in size and aerial images that can get into the 100s of MBs.

Just keep in mind that at best your going to have about half the speed you had if your servers were located in your building.

Rant over ;)

[rkmcswain]

Just keep in mind that at best your going to have about half the speed you had if your servers were located in your building.



I would say ours is a lot better than that. We *are* using Riverbeds (http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/) though.

[rkmcswain]

We are considering co-locating to an offsite server location. Wondering if anyone has any experiences, if so what areas of concern should we look into? ie latency, bandwidth, license manager and templates on network?



I'll throw this out there....

For license management, speed is of little concern.
AutoCAD et.al, pings the LM every so often (5-15 minutes) and looks for a valid license. The amount of data sent back and forth is minimal. The impact on the end user is none, unless of course the LM cannot be reached, and then the user will be allowed to save his/her work and AutoCAD will shut down.

Say you have 100 licenses. You may choose to keep all 100 on a single server (bad if that server goes down) -or- you may use a redundant LM, which is 3 servers on one site, if one server goes down, the other two can still server up all 100 licenses -or- you might use a distributed LM system where you have multiple LM's at multiple sites, each with a portion of your licenses. If you had 4 in this case, each one could hold 25 licenses, and if one LM goes down or offline, you still have 75 licenses available.

More info: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3969608

[cadtag]

and don't forget about the backhoe operator a mile away having a bad day and ripping though the telco lines connecting you to your data. Can your organization really afford a couple of days worth of thumb twiddling while the repair crews get around to it? Make sure that goes in the budget under 'off site savings'.

Doing overnight backups off-site is reasonable, if you are not concerned about the hosting organization accessing your data. (BTW -- what's their liability in case of accidental or malicious exposure of company confidential or trade secret data? how about personnel records? )

but -- IMHO anything critical to the business or daily operations needs to be under your roof, under your ownership, & under your control.

[rkmcswain]

but -- IMHO anything critical to the business or daily operations needs to be under your roof, under your ownership, & under your control.

On the other hand, one could argue that having that data located elsewhere is critical also.

When Hurricane Ike hit here last year, this building was without electricity for about 9 days, forcing us to move several servers to a location in which we could access them. I'm not claiming to be an expert in DR, but sometimes you just have to weigh the risks and do the best you can...

[Glenn Pope]

I would say ours is a lot better than that. We *are* using Riverbeds (http://www.riverbed.com/products/appliances/) though.

Hadn't heard of these guys before. In "real world experience" is it really making a difference? Like to hear a little more on your take on this.

Thanks!

[rkmcswain]

Hadn't heard of these guys before. In "real world experience" is it really making a difference? Like to hear a little more on your take on this.

Thanks!

It's not even close. With the riverbeds in place, accessing a server in a remote office feels almost the same as accessing a local server.