Regarding your last comment. Most of my staff call our Remote Desktop system 'VPN'. In fact several in my department refer to it that way.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jon D Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] VPN and high bandwidth applications Thanks for everyone's responses so far! Responses below: >>Wouldn't something like Citrix XenApp offload the performance hit onto the >>local network for your remote users? Good suggestion. We're actually already using it(have been for 10+ years), but end-users hate it. I might end up trying something like XenDesktop and see if they like that better just for remote access.... >>It is, however, something that WAN accelerators were designed to help >>mitigate. I saw that Riverbed has a mobile client which sounds interesting. >>So normally the SQL traffic is between the users desktop and the sql backend? Yeah for some of the apps the traffic from the workstation can easily hit 100megs doing a normal operation or query. >>A VPN is just a network link. Nothing more, nothing less. Think of it like >>a really long Ethernet cable. Very good point. I'm over thinking it. I think the end-users have psyched me out by keep saying all other companies have VPNs. It seems like using a VPN w/o something like RDP or Citrix is only useful for simple apps like outlook/word/excel/etc. Summary: Sounds like a VPN is what it is, and something like Citrix is the current best solution for chatty apps... Thanks, Jon On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Ben Scott <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Jon D <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > I'm not an expert with VPNs... A VPN is just a network link. Nothing more, nothing less. Think of it like a really long Ethernet cable. > Is it possible to have end-users use any sort of VPN technology to access > high-bandwidth apps? (1) I'm with others in the "Use a VPN to access the network remotely; use RDP (or Citrix or whatever) to run applications that aren't WAN friendly" camp. I see them as complementary technologies, not replacements for each other. (2) Bandwidth is only part of the equation. Latency (AKA packet delay AKA round trip time) is just as important. Indeed, latency is usually more of a problem these days, because everybody's talking bandwidth and ignoring latency, so you have to fight just to find someone who understands the problem. In other words: If you have a gigabit link with RTT at 300 ms, it will still feel like an old analog modem. -- Ben
