Network Access and Bandwidth

As companies grow, the distances between users increase and the users needs for data expand. As people travel and satellite and regional offices are opened, users must be able to continue sharing data in a timely manner. In some cases, dial-up solutions such as RAS can meet this need. The RAS solution, however, treats a remote computer utilizing a low bandwidth modem connection as though it s part of a regular network connection. Certain ap-plications optimized for dial-up access, such as a Web browser, might perform acceptably. However, if you need to transfer files to or from the host server or if you attempt to run an application on your remote computer that accesses a file from a host computer, RAS performance might be unacceptable. In addition, RAS can get costly if you use it to provide access for a remote office of 10 to 15 people. At that number of users, you would most likely expand your bandwidth by using ISDN, T1, or T3. The higher the bandwidth, the greater the cost, and to borrow a common phrase, bandwidth is money. Ironically, a thin-client/server application that uses RAS for a connection runs extremely well.

The thin-client/server model makes efficient use of a system s bandwidth.

Using a thin-client/server application, especially Citrix s Independent Computing Architecture (ICA), can reduce your costs by allowing you to utilize less bandwidth. The application and the data can both reside on the same local network. With the thin-client/server model, for which 100 percent of the processing occurs on the server, applications can run up to 10 times faster over existing remote-node servers and branch-office routers than they can using traditional methods. In fact, the ICA protocol is optimized to work well with low-bandwidth dial-up connections. This can help save on your current and future communication and expansion costs, especially for situations in which bandwidth is scarce or network traffic is heavy.

The ICA protocol is optimized for dial-ins as slow as 14.4 Kbps.