Remote working from NY in London office

[xk8mate]

Good evening,
I'm looking for some advise regarding working remotely from NY at my London office, utilizing their server, rips & proofers. I'm a retoucher so have a powerful Mac Pro situated in London I need to access and the network. I need to buy a set up in NY and was looking at Mac mini, maybe the i7 over the i5 processor with at least 8GB memory. Now is is more important to ram it up further in NY or should I be mainly concentrating on getting the fastest bandwidth of my internet connection as my London Mac is already super powerful. As effectively that will still be my main workstation although remotely? Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated.

 

[brand]

So your asking for advice on a Mac Mini in the Mac Pro forum or am I confused?

 

[xk8mate]

Sorry..... I'm asking if the mini needs to be an i7 with lots of RAM to remotely drive the Mac Pro in London or is it about having the fastest Internet connection that's important when working remotely.

 

[theSeb]

Sorry..... I'm asking if the mini needs to be an i7 with lots of RAM to remotely drive the Mac Pro in London or is it about having the fastest Internet connection that's important when working remotely.

It is the internet connection.

 

[applegeek897]

Specs of the Mac Mini mean nothing, as long as it has Gigabit ethernet which it does then that is all that matters, because you will be using the Mac Pro's power not the Mac Mini's.

 

[xk8mate]

Specs of the Mac Mini mean nothing, as long as it has Gigabit ethernet which it does then that is all that matters, because you will be using the Mac Pro's power not the Mac Mini's.

That's great, long winded question I know but thanks for your easy explanation!

 

[initialsBB]

Specs of the Mac Mini mean nothing, as long as it has Gigabit ethernet which it does then that is all that matters, because you will be using the Mac Pro's power not the Mac Mini's.

Gigabit ethernet won't do anything for you if you're going through the internet to get to the Mac Pro in London from New York. Internet connection is the limiting factor. I'll also add that if you have really fast internet in New York but ****** upload in London, the London connection will be the lowest denominator to which your New York link will drop to.

 

[Chicane-UK]

Frankly if I was doing that sort of work, I wouldn't want to be doing it remotely - I'd want the machine local to me. The specification of the machine you're working on with the set-up you propose is irrelevant - as others have said, all that matters is the speed of the internet at your place of work, and the remote location. If any of those is poor, you're going to have a hard time.

As I say, the best possible option, would be getting a machine and the relevant software local to you rather than trying to remote work.

 

[deconstruct60]

Frankly if I was doing that sort of work, I wouldn't want to be doing it remotely - I'd want the machine local to me.

What want to do and what addresses the problem's constraints sometimes aren't the same thing.

If there is a team effort involved here and this users is supplementing the resources assigned to the overall project then the location isn't going to be optimized around that individual user.

If being hired on some 'lone wolf' project then sure. Ship the data on disks to NYC , work on them, ship them back.

As I say, the best possible option, would be getting a machine and the relevant software local to you rather than trying to remote work.

The size of the data is the large constraint here. If the files being worked on are very large and need to be actively shared with others then they should remain local. It makes far more sense to move the computation to the data rather than drag the data to the computation in that case. If the size of the bits on the screen is much smaller than the file it is cheaper to ships those bits back.

Probably don't want to open GB sized files over an intercontinental Internet link. 100's MB ones typically won't work so well either.


That said folks have missed a bit of issues with the internet link. Two issues security and latency.

Security; more than likely there is some security involved in the link. Somewhat likely there is a some Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection involved here ( some hole is being poked in the firewall at the London site). So not just the uplink speed on the London side is need consideration but the encrypted throughput through that link needs to be considered. The network team in London is probably going to 'own' that side of the VPN link. Best to check to see what speed they can do.


If London can upload at 20Mb/s then something like 22-24Mb/s on the NYC side is sufficient. If London can only do 3Mb/s then 20 on NYC side is overkill (and really won't help much ). Over provisioning a bit will help with traffic peaks with your local ISP ( Netflix time in the neighborhood). Although if only 3Mb/s and shipping a large monitor's bits over network going to have problems.


Latency; Your NYC and London ISP may have fast connections, but there may be other internet providers in between. ATT -> BT or Verizon -> BT may mean fewer "middle men" than other combos.