I am a netware man but the principle is the same. We are in the process of consolidating primary school servers over 2mb circuits and Successmaker was a problem.
We resolved it by
1 Creating a local directory called "localsuccess" on each pc
2 Copy all the curricullum question bank etc from the networked drive ie the entire "cai" and successmaker directory (approx 4gb) less the database, backup etc. (takes a while!!)
3 In place of the Mapped drive in the login script use the "subst" command to substitute the localsuccess directory for the previous network share. ie subst m: C:\localsuccess M now points to the C: drive and fools SSM.
4 Point all ODBC drivers to the new database
5 Mount the new database on the new server
All questions are now constructed locally and only the database pointers traverse the LAN or WAN. This significantly improves local performance. The only downside is an increase of 4gb in the local image.
The database traffic is minimal with this configuration.
I am not sure if MS have a problem with the version of database or what but sybase will happily run on most variants of linux which may be an alternative but free route to follow.
I am not sure if this is of any help but SSM is a bit of a pain. The best of luck!!