On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Atom Powers <atom.pow...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You also mentioned file access time - could you describe that problem a bit >> more? > > Files are primarily served though either CIFS (samba) or HTTP (Web > CMS) and files can be very large, up to 1GB. Rough estimates show that > a 200ms latency increases the download time by up to 20%, > proportionally larger for smaller files. "CIFS" makes me think many of these things are internal facing apps? Have you looked at putting WAN accelerators on the links in-between sites? At $lastjob we used Steelheads to turn cruddy t-1's in the middle of nowhere into respectable links and for ds3's between major sites they turned CIFS traffic into nearly-next-door. Short of that, tuning/fixing MTU's, pMTUd, and VPN settings to cope with latency / be more optimal and dealing with bandwidth hogs always tend to help. For me, cloudifying existing entrenched enterprise level apps isn't my idea of fun. So, I'd ensure that the entire network path between $far and $near is as optimal as possible before doing major surgery to the application stack. After that I'd start looking for slack in the edges of the apps that can be solved with CDN-like or proxy like infrastructure at sites to reduce calls across the long links. It may be that the 20k of html gets to the client very quickly, but the 75k of images in 4k chunks take forever to load. (Note, some WAN accelerators will do this sort of thing for you too). Another way to solve this kind of issue for people in really, really far flung places is with Citrix/RDP/VNC/NoMachine to let the user remote in to a machine closer to the data. These kinds of services stream and compress pretty well and for the office of users 6k miles away who need to importantly run some critical reports once a reporting period, they can be a perfect fit. -n -- ------------------------------------------- nathan hruby <nhr...@gmail.com> metaphysically wrinkle-free ------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
