Replicating a portal between Europe and Asia

We currently are working on new project to set-up a replica of our European portal instance in Asia. This is not a common portal deployment project, so I would like to share this challenge with you, and see if some of you could have implemented a similar architecture...

In our case, this duplication of instances is required mainly because of bandwith limitations: our intranet users in Asia experience very bed response time when connecting to the "remote" European portal (network latency is the main issue).
Using local proxy was not an option because in our context it is hard to ensure that every Asian user can use a proxy. Moreover, we have several dynamic webapplication integrated to the portal (and these application are not easily cacheable).

So we have decided to install a replica (mirror) in Asia with its own local database and LDAP.

This architecture will require to replicate 3 kinds of data:
- LDAP data (using the standard LDAP replication mechanism),
- WCM Content (using the WCM standard syndication),
- Websphere portal pages: in this case we will do a custom development (based on xmlaccess) to synchronize page from both portal.

We plan to implement a master/master data flow to give the opportunity for our authors to create content locally (to ensure better performances).

Installation of the Asia instance is currently under way, so I will keep posting on the subject in the next weeks.

For the moment, the bigger issue we are experiencing is due to the size of our WCM repository. As it is bigger than 10 GB, we have to initialize the remote WCM database using a dump file (and then enable the syndication). However, for the moment, our local tests are not working; after importing the dump on the subscriber server, enabling syndication cause the subsciber server to crash...we are currently working with the support to try to fix this problem.