SugarCRM Clustering

[shannonw]

After the overwhelming response to my first post I thought I'd give it one more go.

I have offices all over Australia (including Perth) plus offices in NZ, Thailand, Philippines & China.

I would love them to all use a single application of CRM however it is not mandatory. The issue is that from China I know that the latency is quite large due to the limited fibre in and out of the country. "If" the speed becomes an issue, what are my options for clustering or mirroring in country?

i.e. Can I put a server in country that synchronises with the head office server?

I suppose I could simply implement 2 versions of the software one for each country as long as I had admin access but I really like the thought of having visibility across all businesses.

Please let me know your thoughts on possible solutions as I am very close to making a decision on our businesses future and this is leading the race at the moment.

[Angel]

One approach would be to maintain like installs of the application at all sites, then designate one of the install's MySQL server to be the master and have the other MySQL servers synchronize with it via MySQL's built-in replication capabilities.

Further details on replication are available here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/replication.html

But, that approach may be too restrictive because you can only make updates on the master. Your business needs will dictate whether that would be an issue or not.

Another idea would be to use Jitterbit to accomplish a similar task. That should allow you to do updates anywhere, but I think there is still a potential for data loss, but should only occur if two or more sites happen to update the same record in the database since your last "sync."

More info on Jitterbit is available here: http://www.jitterbit.com/