Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Choosing a File-Sharing Model
Chapter 260
— NFS mounts can create complex cross-dependencies between
systems; these can become hard to keep track of and pose
problems during boot and shutdown.
• Performance:
— Heavily dependent on LAN and subnet performance.
— Running applications locally may alleviate LAN bottlenecks, but
at the cost of losing the computing power of a large server.
• Disorganization:
— If users are even partially free to administer their own systems,
complexity, and unexpected problems, may increase beyond your
power to manage them.
Summary Because of its flexibility, and perhaps also because it seems to many
people a natural way to arrange things, this model is increasingly
popular, and this document devotes much of its space to it.
In theory, this model allows you to have the best of all worlds; everyone
in the workgroup can use the best combination of the group’s resources -
compute power, mass storage, printing, display capabilities - without
being so dependent that they all have to go home if a server goes down.
In practice, there are difficult trade-offs. If you want everyone to send
and receive their mail locally, for example (rather than depend on a mail
hub) you will have to configure and maintain mail alias files on each
workstation, a lot of work in a large organization. If you want to reduce
LAN traffic by having people run applications and store data locally, you
will not only have to arrange to back up that data, but may also find
yourself buying disks and memory to get acceptable local performance.
On the other hand, consolidating resources on servers should save you
time and money, but it leads you back toward a mainframe-like
dependency on a few systems, with an additional dependency on the
performance and reliability of the LAN.
If you adopt this model, you should allow some time (and if possible,
some of your budget) for trial and error and refinement. “Distributing
Applications and Data” on page 61 some guidelines and suggestions.