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LISA 2001 Abstract
Remote Outsourcing Services for Multiple Branch Offices and Small Businesses via the Internet
Dejan Diklic, Venkatesh Velayutham, Steve Welch, Roger
Williams
Abstract
Maintaining a reliable computing infrastructure encompassing
servers, clients, printers and Internet connections is one of the
major problems faced by branch office managers and small business
owners. The cost associated with good systems administration is too
high for either small businesses or branch offices. At the same time
large service corporations don't see this market as attractive due to
the high startup and infrastructure cost. We at IBM Almaden Research
Center developed a research prototype that enables remote outsourcing
services for multiple small offices from a central location via the
Internet using the already available commercial software. This
technology provides a solution for both small business owners (branch
office managers) and service providers. We use the term small business
for any company with one to 100 client machines. For our purposes
branch offices can be categorized as small businesses. By combining
our newly developed systems management technologies with an existing
Internet connectivity server, small office LANs can be remotely
monitored and managed via the Internet. At the same time the need for
expensive leased lines and dedicated routers for secure connectivity
is removed since both routing and security are provided through
software. In this paper we will describe the approach taken as well as
utilized software and hardware components.
Now that we described the target environment we introduce all of
the components of the solution. In the second section we describe
implementation details. Short summary of the work is given at the end
of the article.
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