February 24, 2005, 3:42 PM — Johanna Ambrosio spoke with Aaron Wetherhold about the implementation of wide area file services at his company, Architectural Testing. This is an edited transcript of that conversation. You may also listen to the original interview here.
Hi. I'm Johanna Ambrosio, and welcome to ITworld Voices. Today, we're talking with Aaron Wetherhold. Aaron is System Administrator at Architectural Testing. His firm makes sure that windows, doors, and other building products are up to snuff. A few months ago the company implemented wide area file services. The goal was to help its six regional offices and headquarters consolidate and more easily share files. Aaron will talk about what lead to this decision and how it's been working out.
Johanna Ambrosio: Hi Aaron. Thank you for joining us today.
Aaron Wetherhold: Hello.
Ambrosio: I was wondering if you could tell us about your overall IT environment. What are your major applications, server, and other infrastructure?
Wetherhold: Sure. We have a corporate office in York, Pennsylvania that has about 150 employees, and we have 6 regional offices spread out throughout the country that have anywhere from 5 to 30 employees at each office. Our main application is file and print. We share a lot of files between the offices, and that's mainly what we're interested in tying our offices together with.
Ambrosio: Okay. So, I'm wondering what was going on that prompted a need for a wide area file service? Was there a specific driver related to either business or technology?
Wetherhold: Definitely. What we found was that moving files was slow across the LAN. We have a VPN set up that goes across the Internet, and we found that moving files was slow. But more than moving files, opening files and especially browsing folders was extremely slow to the point where we found that our end users really just avoided it at all costs. If they could avoid sharing files or accessing a file on another system, they would. They would do everything they could. Sometimes they would even send emails to the other office saying 'hey, can you please search for these files?'
Wetherhold: As we were getting larger and larger, more offices were coming online, and more of a need to share data between offices, we found that this was becoming a real hindrance to our business application. We found that there was usually a need to go in and see files between the various locations, and with that obstacle in the way, we needed to solve it somehow.
Ambrosio: Okay. So, how long ago was the system implemented and how is it working?
Wetherhold: We implemented the system roughly three months ago.
Ambrosio: And what are you using?
Wetherhold: We are using the Tacit software. We implemented it roughly three months ago. And we found that it allows for browsing of the files to be almost as fast as if it was a local file. And we found accessing the file was much faster than before.
Ambrosio: Do you have any numbers or have you done any tests to quantify that at all, or is it basically experiential?
Wetherhold: It's more experiential. We're a relatively small company. We did not do a return of investment. I know larger corporations and CIOs really need to show a return on investment when they do a product. We focused our pass or fail grade on the end users. Before we had Tacit, people were not using the file browsing, or when they were using it they were complaining about it. We'd hear a lot of complaints. Now that the product is in place, we hear no complaints. And in fact, we even get that occasional 'hey, this is fantastic. Thanks for fixing something'. Usually no news is good news, but in this case we actually even have people calling us up and saying we can't believe how much faster you made this.
Ambrosio: That sounds great. So, it sounds like it's working pretty well then.
Wetherhold: It is. We're very happy with it. We bought the product mainly for that application and mainly for that reason, to make the experience for our end users better. One of the things that we found is true is that it's working so well, we're going to start moving the data back to our corporate office. We're in phase one now where we're just sharing files a lot more smoothly between offices. Phase two, which I see as taking place over the next six months, will be for us to basically move all the data back to our corporate office. And there will be no local data at the regional offices.
Ambrosio: Why are you doing that?
