[RKDinOKC]

Yep, if you have your servers setup correctly it should be working just like a local data center without the network lag or expense required for faster access. I don't think people understand the actual costs of running fast enough internet to keep cloud services running fast enough to do any good.

When I had the media server setup in my department (before we got a networking "guru") it used multiple servers and network connections/switches connected to the fiber raids to get maximum transfer for up to 5 people pulling down large files at the same time. To the users access was as fast as their local hard drives. I thought it was pretty cool that users could edit videos on a server after I got done with it.

Network guy they hired had no idea about media access and redid everything for just normal networking and killed all the high speed access. Glad I am not involved in that anymore. Amazes me how people change things just to change them. The users still remember when they had real access to the servers though. The supervisor and people using the servers basically had no say in the changes. Stupid, if you ask me.

I also had a 2 Macs running as internet routers with multiple ISPs, up to 4. It ran some really cool software called Intergate. It did way more than the cisco pix we use now. The intergate setup ganged our internet connections so both upload and download was as fast as all the IPS connections put together. Had it setup so it did what I call poor man's border protocol. If any of the IPS's connections failed it would route all the traffic thru the other IPS's until it came back up. The trick is to re-route incoming traffic due to DNS. The network guy got rid of the macs because he claimed they weren't secure. The pix has been hacked several times now. The Macs ran for over 10 years and never got hacked.

What the heck do I know, I'm just a family member that has a title position and doesn't know what I am talking about.