Remote office speed issues

We have an office in China (2 users) that accesses our network via Citrix MetaFrame (ICA), we serve the whole desktop. Performance is becoming a huge issue as they need to send and receive lots of images via email as well as viewing images from our UK server, scrolling through a series of images is almost impossible.

Is there a better way of doing this?

What problem does ICA solve that them using their regular OS plus a VPN (or similar) connection to your office wouldn't?

What I'm getting at is that it might be more efficient for them to access the data directly, rather than a picture of the data.

We use Terminal Server and it seems to work well on slow VPN connections.

I just assumed that doing it via Citrix would be better, as it's not downloading any data to the remote site. We use Citrix in the UK and it works OK.

I hadn't even considered setting up a VPN that enabled them to access the data directly because I just thought it'd take a lot more bandwidth, am I wrong?

We find ICA faster than RDP for screen redraws and stuff but as I said scrolling through images in China is a real pain.

It depends on the workflow, probably.

I guess it'd be relatively easy to test. Will try it and see.

One of the larger issues, beyond performance, is that a remote desktop connection (whether through citrix or through RDP) carries a different set of security implications than a VPN does.

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We're not overly concerned about security, we've used Metaframe since NT4.0/MF1.8 (1997 I think) and have had no issues. We're a small company (25 users), even though we're expanding rapidly it'll take us a few years to reach even 50 users.

They'd only help to a small extent, we deal in garments, you need to see a pretty large image for a useful level of detail, especially as a lot of images are poorly taken.

Bits are bits and pipes are pipes. You can only squeeze so much through. If you need to move hi-res images, that needs a bigger pipe.

I worked for a company that did a lot of digital art and video work, stuff to take away from the offices and on-site for shows.

The pointy haired bosses wanted to centralize everything with remote desktops, until they realized how big - and expensive - the pipes would be to move the data back and forth.

-jk

I realise that having images locally would be better, but there are typically several versions of a product before it's signed off, having images centrally located means everybody's referring to a single image.

I'll try and find out if we can get more bandwidth in China.

Keep in mind latency is also a factor here, especially over remote desktop protocols. Increasing the size of the pipe may not fix what "performance problems" they are complaining about.

If the workflow doesn't involve needing immediate access to new and updated data, you could set up some sort of data mirroring so that the data is local to each site. That way, the data is only sent once, rather than every time a user looks at it. You will have periods of disjoint data, though.

You might also be able to set up some sort of caching proxy, so its slow for the first person who views the data, but then local speeds from then on.

I'm going to test this with one of our UK sites first, just so that we have a current offsite backup more than anything else, I guess if we schedule it right we could do the sync to China while they're asleep. This won't be the real fix though as a lot of the image viewing is done through our business management app which relies on indexing images stored in a central location. What if the images were stored offsite in a data centre somewhere?

Then you're just going to slow all the sites down.

Am I? I know it'll slow all the local workers down but shouldn't the pipe into the data centre have much more bandwidth for remote users?

It's doubtful to be any significantly faster for those other sites, though you're right that it's also unlikely to slow them down further. They'll most likely remain at their current level of slow.

Can you describe your business management app? Windows DFS, a caching proxy or creative aliases might be worth investigating.

Matthew