Aargh.. not more magic black boxes ....
In a previous consultancy life, I had one client who was taken over.
An aggressive little charlie uncle november tosspot turned up from the new headquarters, a location a mere 11000 miles away from the now satellite office I called home at the time.
There was an impending office move for the satellite office. Mr Tosspot decided everything could be operated from servers at HQ, and so he specced up a tiny little comms room for the new satellite office which was little more than a glorified cupboard containing:
- Patch panels
- Switch
- Router connected to a leased line
- A very,very,very,very,very expensive compression blackbox of which Mr Tosspot was very proud indeed.
Not a server in sight. Not even a paltry Domain Controller. Nothing.
Bearing in mind that the now satellite office consisted of 80 people, I'm sure you can guess what happened next....
Mr Tosspot turned up for the weekend of the office move along with a couple of his minions from HQ. I was not so politely shown the door and told not to return again.
Not long after the office opened on the Monday, my mobile rings. Its the Big Cheese, the Managing Director from the satellite office .... practically begging me for help, any help whatsoever, because an office of 80 people was sitting there twiddling its thumbs waiting for files to transfer, for emails to arrive.
I can't remember what solution I put in place. But it was hard work, because all the data was 11000 miles away and Mr Tosspot had taken all the backup tapes with him in his suitcase. I think it might have involved paying a courier a lot of money for a private charter flight (the business these guys were in meant that they were literally loosing millions by the hour, and HQ didn't have the manpower or expertise to act as a DR site for what the guys in the satellite office did).
Fortunately this was in the days before VoIP, so at least their phones still worked, but they were of bugger all use to their clients !
So forgive me if I exercise a great degree of cynicism when someone comes bearing a magic box promising me increased performance for remote cloud storage. Personally I vowed never to touch such stuff with a proverbial bargepole after my prior experience.