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Q. What workgroup services are required to support shared assets?
A. This is about how not to lose the bits of art.
OK so we have a group of lets say around 10 artists producing graphical bits and pieces. Some other guys are producing movies and sound tracks. Over the other side of the room, there’s a team of guys writing C code and a bunch of people working with the designers to produce the scripts that connect it all together. What workgroup level services do they need to facilitate this process of working together?
Obviously they all need to be networked together and be able to send and receive e-mail between themselves. You should consider connecting one machine to the Internet on a big, fat pipe you can share. This will allow the workgroup to send and receive e-mail and get information from outside the company. You will need to judge what kind of connection to get from your ISP. A T1 is really a minimum for this sort of a group but could be cost prohibitive. This is still too slow to move much in the way of video around the net but its good enough for most other asset types. Your firewall solutions must include ways to prevent penetration from outside. It should also check incoming mail for attachments and be able to scan inside them and if necessary recognise and scan compressed files for viruses. Be sure to check word processor macros and be wary in general of any executable code.
You may need to equip one machine with a very large array of disks and use this as the central library server. You might also consider serving a CD-ROM jukebox with software developer disks. If you are developing Apple software, there are about a dozen CD-ROMs that would be useful. For PC systems it’s probably about the same. You can get ‘juke box’ systems to hold multiple disks. Sony do an audio CD player that can hold up to 100 disks but it only has one drive so maybe there is a CD-ROM variant of this. There are other alternatives where six CD-ROM drives are mounted on one SCSI address. Some cheaper alternatives that are coming to market allow up to 7 disks to be put into an auto-changer and then mounted on demand.
Centralised printing services are an obvious and useful facility.
With a network of machines, you can also distribute compute intensive tasks to idle machines and use what would otherwise be wasted CPU processing capability. For example, if one of your development projects requires a large amount of rendered art to be produced or perhaps some QuickTime VR content, you can distribute the work around the local net to get the rendering done more quickly. Newer software may even provide this facility automatically
The key enabler is to make sure that everyone who needs an item of data can find it quickly and access it as if they had a virtual large machine at their disposal. Its unlikely that everyone will need to access the same resources all at once so by interleaving each persons work, you provide each of them with a much larger facility than they would otherwise have in a single machine on their desktop.
Because everything is distributed, it is also more fault-tolerant and you can replace bottlenecks with more powerful solutions as the finance and hardware becomes available.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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