Difficult to find the most appropriate subforum here since my question is a mix of hardware, software & Internet connectivity/networking. Feel free to move to more appropriate forum if needed.
General
I work for a humanitarian organization/NGO with locations in 37 countries worldwide. A lot of these countries are countries with ongoing conflicts or post-war countries with little or no infrastructure. So our only option for connectivity is Internet through satellite, which is expensive. Insanely expensive (roughly $1000 USD per Mbit). Being an NGO it's difficult to justify spending a lot of money on bandwidth so we can have 50 employees sharing 1% of the bandwidth an average family in the western world have. Due to lack of dedicated IT staff on each location and lack of electricity 24/7 in several locations there is no local server setup (computers run in workgroup).
Areas to optimize
After having visited a few locations and ran network statistics over a few days I see 3 areas of improvement:
1) Windows updates
Hence no server infrastructure/Windows server update service each client is grabbing updates directly from Microsoft, which generates a lot of traffic. Most clients are on Windows 7 but we are planning upgrade to Windows 10
2) QoS
There's the issue of non-work-traffic jamming up the line.
3) Caching
With very little bandwidth all traffic we can avoid pushing through the satellite will be beneficial
Possible solutions
This is basically what I'm hoping for input on. There are solutions like Riverbed boxes but they cost $6000 or so in hardware and another $5000 in licenses. This is gonna be too much on all our satellite locations. Plus I'm pretty certain we should be able to get the same functionality cheaper and simpler, possibly by rigging something ourselves. Ideally the solution we pick should cover all 3 above in the same box, should require as little maintenance as possible (hence no local IT staff) and should require little investments (hence NGO).
QoS is funtionality most cheap routers come with so this part is probably easiest to solve. A lot of proxies come with caching functionality (with varying degrees of how "smart" the caching is) so this part is probably also something we should be able to sort out. On Windows updates ideally I would have a fairly simple box that I could set clients to download from. I know Windows 10 has the "update over LAN" feature where clients can share Windows updates and I'm not sure if this is something we can benefit from. I don't have in-depth knowledge on this but the first thing that strikes me is this scenario: Say 50 people arrive at work at the same time and an update has been launched at nighttime. Initially no client on the LAN will have the update and all of them will start downloading it, right?
Anyway all input on best way to reach our goal is much appreciated.
In advance, thank you.
General
I work for a humanitarian organization/NGO with locations in 37 countries worldwide. A lot of these countries are countries with ongoing conflicts or post-war countries with little or no infrastructure. So our only option for connectivity is Internet through satellite, which is expensive. Insanely expensive (roughly $1000 USD per Mbit). Being an NGO it's difficult to justify spending a lot of money on bandwidth so we can have 50 employees sharing 1% of the bandwidth an average family in the western world have. Due to lack of dedicated IT staff on each location and lack of electricity 24/7 in several locations there is no local server setup (computers run in workgroup).
Areas to optimize
After having visited a few locations and ran network statistics over a few days I see 3 areas of improvement:
1) Windows updates
Hence no server infrastructure/Windows server update service each client is grabbing updates directly from Microsoft, which generates a lot of traffic. Most clients are on Windows 7 but we are planning upgrade to Windows 10
2) QoS
There's the issue of non-work-traffic jamming up the line.
3) Caching
With very little bandwidth all traffic we can avoid pushing through the satellite will be beneficial
Possible solutions
This is basically what I'm hoping for input on. There are solutions like Riverbed boxes but they cost $6000 or so in hardware and another $5000 in licenses. This is gonna be too much on all our satellite locations. Plus I'm pretty certain we should be able to get the same functionality cheaper and simpler, possibly by rigging something ourselves. Ideally the solution we pick should cover all 3 above in the same box, should require as little maintenance as possible (hence no local IT staff) and should require little investments (hence NGO).
QoS is funtionality most cheap routers come with so this part is probably easiest to solve. A lot of proxies come with caching functionality (with varying degrees of how "smart" the caching is) so this part is probably also something we should be able to sort out. On Windows updates ideally I would have a fairly simple box that I could set clients to download from. I know Windows 10 has the "update over LAN" feature where clients can share Windows updates and I'm not sure if this is something we can benefit from. I don't have in-depth knowledge on this but the first thing that strikes me is this scenario: Say 50 people arrive at work at the same time and an update has been launched at nighttime. Initially no client on the LAN will have the update and all of them will start downloading it, right?
Anyway all input on best way to reach our goal is much appreciated.
In advance, thank you.