When expanding with a small bistro in front of a catering kitchen. What would be the advantage to a peer-to-peer network over a client-server network?

Answer 1

A client-server network requires a machine dedicated to the purpose of being a network server. As such, it cannot be used as a workstation or have any tasks running other than the serving of requests made by workstations from across the network so as to provide the performance and functionality of a network server. This requires more expense because a bona fide server tends to require a network operating system with an appropriate number of workstation licenses (if applicable) and the hardware required for said server (including an appropriately-powerful processor, enough RAM to run the functions required, and the hard drive space to support the NOS as well as any storage the users might require for personal files and/or collaborative projects).

A peer-to-peer network is generally much more inexpensive to deploy as no machine has to be designed to be a network server. Any Windows network (even those that have a machine running Windows Server on it) is a peer-to-peer since all machines (including the WIndows Server machine) can be used as a workstation and can run applications just like any other Windows computer. The drawback is that the level of performance is not as high as can be achieved in a client-server network design. One advantage that can be realized, however, is that since there is no central server, storage can be distributed to each of the computers. Therefore, if one machine fails, only the files stored on that machine are offline and unreachable whereas if all files were stored on the server and it had a problem, all the network data stored upon it would be unavailable. As such, distributed storage gives more fault tolerance for the majority of the data.

For a small network--especially one that does not see high utilization--a peer-to-peer network is definitely the simplest and most cost-effective design. However, if you intend to push around countless gigabytes of data on a regular basis or do a lot of updating of databases or other such transactions (meaning hundreds or thousands of entries per hour), then a client-server may make more sense. From what you have mentioned in your query, however, it seems that your intent is a small food business, so client-server would be my professional recommendation based on this limited information.

If you would like to discuss this further and get some additional questions answered or obtain further advice, feel free to drop me a line. I'm always glad to help.

Answer 2

The peer-to-peer network would be less expensive to create and maintain -apex