Ponder This

Tuesday March 07, 2006

Remote office Management

I just completed reading an article published this month in It Architect When I first saw the title, I had a bit of hope some of our technology might get a plug. Unfortunately, we did not get any. In summary, the article covers the headaches related with managing remote office locations. The article is focused on offices with fewer than ,or slightly more than five workers.

The intention of the article was to focus on solutions that are marketed differently, than what is being deployed today and recent innovations that have come to market. Unless I missed something, everything I read was another device or product that could improve the management nightmare. Nothing really solving the management nightmare.

There are a lot of technology's in the market, I feel can solve or drastically decreased the management nightmare in remote offices. None were given any consideration. It my opinion part of the challenge today, is architect innovation, and the willingness to do things different from what is already known or feels comfortable. What I call, the fear of the unknown. I suffered from this early in my career and left behind some preaty bad decision at past employers, for others to manage. I also use too take data security for granted. However, the rapid rate at which personal information is leaking or being stolen, frightens me. One area of the article covers WAFS and Content Management Solutions. These solutions have had a nice growth rate, as remote office managers try to control the ammount of data going across the network, in doing so, they are putting the data outside the enterprise, where it could more easily be compromised. Granted, some places will limit what data is allowed to get cached. This section of the article also linked back to an article on leveraging virtualzation for server consolidation. It mentions none of those solutions was available for less than 10,000 dollars. It's not clear to me, how server consolidation solves remote management problems but, I do like the challenge of of a 10,000 dollar price point.

I Looked at a five user, remote satallite office, with five users and the following assumptions. An existing T1 or high quality DSL line is in place. An existing Router/VPN appliance is already in place as well as an existing network printer. A quick pricing exercise on our web site put me pretty close to the mark!

Quantity Description List Price Line Total

5 Sun Ray 170 Ultra-Thin Client $869.00 $4,345.00

25 RTU, Single Seat Only $99.00 $2475.00

5 Keyboard $50.00 $250.00

1 Sun Fire X4100 Server $3,495.00 $3,495.00

Total: $10,565

Ok, Ok, so I did not hit the 10,000 mark. I could keep ringing the water out of rag, and squeeze more out of it but, I think this short exercise gets the point across. In this situation you a remote office could run their desktop session across a secure VPN connection. Sure, you might want to consider a backup network drop if connectivity is un-reliable. You might want to add another server for failover. But, all in all if you want zero data in a remote office and an administrator that does not have nightmares when he is sleeping at night, this is something to consider. This drastically different solution does not meet the innovation mark of new technology. We have had it for a while and it is being adopted and deployed.

Leveraging the low bandwidth capability of a Sun Ray based solution, can pave the road to a nightmare free, highly secure, easy to manage remote office solution. You have the choice of delivering your Linux, Solaris or Windows based desktop. Where the required amount of bandwidth may be too high for say a larger regional office, I feel remote offices are where the most bang for the buck is. You can get a surprising amount of clients running full screen desktop down a small low end pipe. For quest from a real world user see below " Quotes from the Customer."