We have a small office that runs on Citrix connected to our HQ via a Megastream service (1Mb) connection. The remote office needs to connect to a database that contains a 16-Gb database. My problem is this remote office has grown and the 1Mb service is no longer any good as there are over 20 users. We have had prices for increasing the link speed and unfortunately they are approaching prohibitive levels e.g 2 Mb is twice the price, 10 Mb is 120% and 100 Mb is 200%. What would you recommend: Increasing the link speed or making the remote office independent with the disadvantages of having two databases to administer?
-- Phil Hare

Since adding additional bandwidth may be more costly than you may prefer to spend, let's look at the options for handling the database. I will assume that both offices need to make changes to the database for the purposes of our conversation. There are several things to think about with the configuration you are evaluating.

If you have two separate databases, you will need to have some way of managing the entries and changes and replicating them to the other database. There are a couple of ways that you can look at handling this; there may be others depending on your specific type of database.

If you make changes to one database, you will need to look at populating the changes made to one database and publishing them to the other database. With this same process, you will need to look at handling conflict resolution. That means that if two records in the same database are edited at the same or nearly same time, figuring out a way that you can decide which which will be applied and which will be discarded or which will be applied and in what order. With either of these, you will need to make sure that both database servers will be in time sync with as little variation as possible.

If you go with a multiple database setup, you will need to look at how often you will need to publish or replicate the record changes between the databases. If the changes dont occur frequently or in large numbers, synchronizing the two databases might be able to be done in one pass at night when inter office communication should be at a minimum.

If neither one of these options is possible, then you may have no other choice than to increase your line speed. See if your provider offers an option of having one speed guaranteed all the time and then bursting up to a higher speed when needed. Look at how the provider charges for the bursting as you may find that buying the increased capacity may be cheaper in the long run than what you may be looking at on a monthly basis for all the postential bursting that may occur. Also, look to see if there are other providers that may be able to provide similar speeds with different ways of providing connectivity. If you can bundle different services such as voice and data together, you might be able to obtain a discount that might help make the additional cost a little less painful to pay. Also, see if the provider will drop their current rates if you commit to multi-year contract. It never hurts to ask, the worst they can say is no.

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