Two Way Satellite Broadband - Uplink Hosting

[fpsbay]

Hi, let me first introduce myself. My name is Brian and I work for <admin edit>. We currently have a number of servers based in various datacentres around the world, but have found this to be expensive since we require a lot of storage. The company director has decided to convert a recently purchased disused building into our own company data centre. As the technical manager, it is my job to get things up and running in the server department - everything is good to go, but I need some advice on Satellite Broadband.

The building we have installed the servers at (classified location) does not have a very good infrastructure, even just 10Mbps lease lines are far too expensive to have installed for our first year of running the new datacentre.

We are considering TooWay for business Satellite Broadband, they can offer us 40Mbps down and 10Mbps uplink with 500GB/month transfer, but the latency is going to be between 400ms and 700ms (PING).

I have never been involved in hosting from a datacentre with satellite link before - usually I work with fibre directly to the building - but I have been asked to look into this. We will have 4 dishes on the building for different server clusters, but I am only interested in the clusters individually.

I need to know what the effects of high latency will be for services such as email hosting, website hosting and file sharing (not torrents, direct FTP uplink). We will need to access the servers via SSH and RDP - I am aware that the high latency will cause "lagging" especially witht remote desktop, but would it have much effect on a mail server?

How does high latency effect clients when the servers are uploading and downloading over two way satellite links?

I realise that lease line cable will be a much better solution, however <edit> are the kind of company that like to try new technologies and review their performance to find solutions - the service we provide for free is more of a business front, our objectives are mainly research based.

Any advise, ideas, thoughts or comments will be much appreciated. I need help understanding the effects of latency on networks when hosting.

Welcome to the forum - however, please do not repeatedly name drop a commercial enterprise, especially in your first post on the forum. It makes you look like a spammer and puts you at risk of getting an instant ban.

[fpsbay]

Thanks for the welcome Chris, apologies for the name dropping! I'll try to avoid that in future.

[TJS]

How much do the satellite links cost; could be worth looking at the Virgin media business connections?

---------- Post added at 13:17 ---------- Previous post was at 13:17 ----------

http://www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk..._services.aspx

[Kymmy]

Used the personal BGAN systems before (designed for one person) but never corporate systems..

What I do know though is that people tend to avoid if it's purely for data connections especially if they have the capability of a fixed leased line connection for a number of reasons.. These include costs, susceptibility to weather/lightning interference with those choosing sat comms purely for reasons of remoteness and/or other uses (like bespoke feeds that can't go across an IP based network.)

Are there any other reasons to go for SAT or is it just a Whim for something special"??

[Waldo Pepper]

BGAN can work out insanely expensive. Especially if you want a link in the 256Kbits speed area with guaranteed bandwidth on demand. When I last used BGAN ~2006/7 with the Explorer 300 from Thrane & Thrane we were looking at $30/Mbyte.

Latency can be a real pain on TCPIP links as the handshaking has a long way to go (Geostationary satellites are usually ~25,000 miles up) which produces single trip delay of 1/10 second not including the waiting for a server to respond.

They are much better for streaming applications that use the UDP protocol.

Can you not use a full duplex microwave link (WiMax or other) to somewhere where there is some form of infrastructure?

Google "ethernet over microwave"