Question : Problem: Redevelop  the whole IT Structure

Dear All,

I know this is a bit unusual question for EE but I thought there will be loads of Experts with loads of experience which could help me with finding a way to restructure our IT sector. Me and my Manager need to come up with a way to link about 10 offices in different countries - all around the world.

At the moment our Head office is in London. All other offices connect to us via VPN (Watchguard Firewall) and use our 3 Termianl Servers and 1 Citrix Server. All our Files for all the offices are stored on 1 of our Servers. Our IT Team is also in London and we Remotely support ALL offices. So at the moment every user connects to London Servers - that means - Singapoure, Holland, Switzerland, US, Brazil, South Africa nad India.

As you can see this is a bit outdated and we already experiencing masisve lags on connections from outside Europe. Our company is growing rapidly and we were given a task of  Decentralising our Servers to maybe few locations so that everyone have a decent quality connection to the servers. The biggeest lag with our set up reaches 300 - 400 ms and for the TS or Citrix that is alot.

We will need all the offices still conected to each other via VPN and a solution for all users to share files. Also we are thinking of staying either with Citrix or TS.

Does anyone know how this can be done ? I know I am asking for a lot but we just need an idea on how to do this. I bet many of you work for big copmanies and you have similar infrastructure or if not maybe you could point us in the right direction.

Any ideas ? Would really appreciate any comments.

Thanks All.

Answer : Problem: Redevelop  the whole IT Structure

If the applications running on the Citrix Servers need to talk to other servers (Databases, Exchange, etc.), then you typically want your Citrix servers as close as possible to those destinations (i.e. same Datacenter).  Otherwise if you Citrix to a "local" location, but then the application has to talk over the WAN to the destination (Database, Exchange, etc.) it may have a "long haul".

Again if your using a "local" location for Citrix, then all you've really gained (depending on server load) is a fast server that has to retrieve information from a long way a way.  Then what's the gain over just having a desktop retrieve information from a long way a way.  Unless that desktop can't handle the applications.

At this point you could use VPN to the Citrix Servers or Citrix Web Interface with Citrix Secure Gateway or there hardware product (Citrix Access Gateway I believe).