satellite office to access in house render farm.... is it possible?

[gadzooks]

I am involved with a small multinational Architectural practice that has an in-house high performance render farm based in the US and overseas satellite offices. Due to the high cost of a point to point MPLS or other dedicated high speed circuits, the offices are connected to the US location using office-to-office VPN?s over the public internet to provide WAN capabilities for their Windows domain, but with insufficient bandwidth for meaningful file sharing. Each site has its own local file storage to a support the needs of the office. The firm is attempting to allow the foreign offices to be able to access the render farm for network rendering. The company makes heavy use of nested X-Ref?d files, which only seem to render reliably when they are attached using UNC pathing. Obviously, this is not desirable for portability (as a drive mapping would be), as all model support and entourage files would be moved across the WAN rather than from local copies of the same files stored in the US location.

[flino2004]

If I can get access to my small farm from anywhere in the world why I big firm wouldn't.... when I was working for I big size firm I was helping them to set up the farm to be used in two locations....the main thing was standardize assets between them and what we did at the time (9 years ago) was a mirror drives for assets (3d/materials, proxies) and custom materials and proxies had to load them out of that drive to control what is available.....Usually mirroring the drives happen 2-3am every day and only a few people could modify/add stuff for everybody else was read-only