What is the guidance for globally distributed teams, Caching options?

[JohnC]

I am the admin for a global organization with users in the US, UK, Australia, Asia and EU.  JIRA and Confluence work great and perform really well for users in the US/Canada, but the latency and performance from other location makes the experience miserable.   Are there any option to provide region caching servers or settings to enable client side caching?

[Doug Swartz]

I'm interested in what replies you get. We have the same challenge with JIRA and Confluence servers located in the US and users in US, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, and the EU. We too, find response time, especially for JIRA, to be very painful from South Africa and Australia.

Our Riverbed type appliances help a little, but not much. JIRA is incredibly chatty on the network, and the user experienceis poor when network latency is bad.

The best thing we've found is to have our users in Australia and Africa use Virtual Desktops located in our US datacenter when they need to access the US JIRA instance. JIRA through a Citrix desktop is much friendler. We purchased separate JIRA and Confluence licenses for the other continents for projects with work mostly "local" to those continents.