I was wondering if anyone out there has been using WAFS or WAN Accelerators as a replacement for DCs at remote sites. This technology is being considered because I need to consolidate many small offices that require access to files, etc. Any experience shared would be greatly appreciated.
I work for a medium sized non-profit company that has over 20 remote offices with 5-20 people in them and my supervisor is pushing to install what he calls "servers" in each site. His definition of a server is any PC with file sharing capbilities and tape backup in each site. I want to keep costs down and have good management of data, but I can't possibly see how 20+ office (and still growing) with merely DSL or Cable hookup will be easily managed by 3 people as well as all phone and cell phone issues with 60 plus individual homes all across 8 states from NJ to NM. My predecessor put 2 servers out there already that are independant domains because with the DSL and Cable, he didn't put any effort into tying together those offices with the home office (one site with 20 persons has Win2k3 Enterprise edition and another has SBS2k3). My desire is to at least get some real firewalls in the corporate office and to the remote sites and impliment VPN (Cisco for example). Then, by using WAFS or WAN Accelerators, I can consolidate all the data to a central server at the head office but give LAN speed to the remote offices. I have read about some successes in the trade journals, but was wondering if anyone out there may have real world experience and some suggestions. Please keep in mind that we are a non-profit org that needs to keep costs down. Thank you. Steven Comeau Sr. Director of IT Community Options Helping to Empower People with Disabilities List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
