Bonnie Roman wrote:

> The question is:
> Would it be cost effective to have one huge 3k that would be located
> in our MIS corporate headquarters supporting 6-8 plants remotely or
> instead purchase 6-8 smaller boxes for each of our plants?

From an IT perspective, one centralized server has the advantages of:

* single point of maintenance, updates, system administration, and
  operations
* No "field trips" troubleshooting remote problems (assuming you don't
  staff each plant with IT people)
* No worries about synchronization of centralized data (remote systems
  don't need to phone home periodically)

A few disadvantages:

* single point of failure should it go up in smoke (can be avoided by
  mirroring/arrays, etc., which is easier to cost-justify for one
  system than 6-8 separate sets of redundancy)
* Network WAN infrastructure is [more] critical to the satellite
  plants, you would likely want a dedicated primary circuit with
  something like an ISDN dial-on-demand backup
* Higher cost of software that may only be used by special groups as
  it must be licensed for a higher tier

To eliminate the latter case, you may want to consider buying a small
machine (918 or similar) to use for developers and specialized apps.
Development tools are *expensive* on big machines.

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>