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itsacrispy

itsacrispy

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Hey guys,

Yet another tech-related question for you guys.

We're thinking about migrating to a remote Client Management System, but there are still some concerns I have. Specifically: What is the deciding factor when comparing the "speed" between an in-house server-based application and a remote application? We're located in Chinatown of SF, and our DSL D/L speed is pretty bad at 2.7MPS. Would this affect our "speed" in terms of interacting with the remote program?

At the same time, we were planning on upgrading our server to increase the space and speed of access. But what exactly defines how fast that "speed" is, when it comes to a server-based application?

Thanks again all.

Mike
 
Yikes... 2.7 mbps?

If so my Comcast at home is faster than that... At my office we have a full 100mbps up/down and it's still pretty slow connecting to Tokyo, and the East Coast.
 
I should mention that I tested out the connection with one workstation, and the program ran well. I'm not able to test the connection with all 5 workstations using the program at once, however. That's what has me a bit worried.
 
So it's a Citrix client/server? IME, Citrix does an ok job on slow connections, I think the main concern would be the speed of the network/server that is running the Citrix server(s).

FWIW and IME, Citrix and Vista do not get along at all. I work at a large law firm (1100+ lawyers) and while we aren't exactly on the cutting edge we are pretty close and still deal with an 'ish-ton of Citrix issues on a daily basis on both XP and Vista machines. If your running a Mac forget about Citrix, you need to run a windows emulator to get onto the system. That's just how it is here, not sure if there is newer stuff out there (I'm pretty sure there is) but that's my take on it.

When you say clients are you talking about employee's or actual clients outside of the company?
 
We're all on XP SP3, so that's the good news. Although I did want to use my laptop for business use. By clients, I mean customers outside of the company. We're an insurance brokerage.
 
Well, it's a moot point now. The owner decided to stay with an in-house program.

That said, what is the limiting factor on the speed at which our workstations can access the server? Right now, when our employees process data using the CMS, there's a bit of a lag.

Thanks!
Mike
 
Mike,

If you're referring to LAN-side application speed for server access, then you can probably benefit greatly by upgrading your switching infrastructure to Gig-E (1000 Mbps) vs FastEthernet (100 Mbps). Make sure both the client and server has Gig-E network cards to benefit, though.

On the other hand, if you're referring to accessing this CMS through your WAN (your DSL, in this case) there's not much you can do besides upgrading that link, which is the bottleneck. Also, not sure whether this is ADSL or SDSL because that could affect the performance of your CMS since it requires almost as much upstream data as downstream per session...
 
Thanks pharoz!

Well, we scrapped the remote CMS due to pricing and downtime issues. We'll probably be upgrading out server instead, so I'll definitely look at the Gig-E option.

I'm not sure what type of DSL we have, but our upstream flow is 431 kbs, versus the 2589 kbs downstream.
 
This means you have ADSL since the dl/up is different, which is typical for residential users.

Also, if you're a Windows house, I would recommend looking into Sharepoint services as a CMS solutions, which is free and can be install as a service in any windows 2003 server.

For free, cheap CMS, check out ZOHO or Google apps and Office live. ZOHO looks promising. If this is something you want to host internal and on a linux box, look into Joomla and Drupal. They are highly flexible with great open source community help, but can be a pain to configure if you're not familiar with web programming... good luck.
 
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