Detox

We're back! After having failed miserably to get the thin client running before the holidays it was relieving that we had a rather uneventful holiday in terms of IT failure. I have moved on to trying a micro drive instead of the flash card as the main disc but I don't really want to spend much more time on it as we can use it for something else and maybe a mini itx based PC would be a better option :o)

We recently commissioned a server in a data centre in Manchester and that should be plugged into our VPN this week so I am looking forward to finally getting some time to investigate the possibilities that will bring. Eventually the plan is to completely split the computing tasks between head office and a rack in Manchester so that where ever possible the hardware can be taken off site, there are lots of obvious benefits to this but the big question is speed.

If the setup proves to be quick enough we may be able to host all of our databases in Manchester but I have a feeling that a more likely scenario would be that all of the pub applications and data will be held in Manchester and all of the head office applications will stay here. The big question is reporting as we are building a system at present which is capable of generating reports on the fly from any of the databases we have be it accounts, HR or pub stock etc etc. The burning question is if we have to split the data between sites can we still report seamlessly across them?

Watch this space.