Bandwidth Requirement Question

smartin · ‎04-09-2009

Any good white papers regarding amount of bandwidth needed for a corporate site. I understand that many factors are involved but I need to come up & present to management the need to increase the amount.

Thanks in advance !

paolo bevilacqua · ‎04-09-2009

How can a white paper can possibly help you in that ?

The upgrade is usually ordered when either the top brass, or business critical employees experience slow network access.

Sometime you can tweak things so that it happens before than later.

All the rest is likely to be received with big yawns only.

lamav · ‎04-09-2009

Stephen:

I hope I can give you a more empathetic answer.

I am assuming that you are experincing some latency on your network that is affecting users and that is why you are even asking about upgrading bandwidth.

If so, then what you need to do is place a sniffer on a particul link and examine the traffic flows. Get a read on the amount of data being passed on the link and you can use that data to try to influence your management.

Since every environment uses different applications, different paths to application servers (some centralize, some local), and many other variables, no one can tell you how much bandwidth you should use, per se. It also depends on the number of people at a particular site, their level of activity, whether they work in shifts, whether their Internet access is mission critical and they must access the Internet through a centralized hub, etc.

As you can see, plenty of things.

If you need to absolutely come up with a number to support a certain number of users, you can think along the lines of alloting to each user a certain amoutn of bandwidth.

So, a T1, without statistical multiplexing or other bandwidth contention mechanisms, will have 24 users on the pipe. Perhaps you can create a general rule of thumb for oversubscription, such as 3:1 or 4:1, depending on other factors.

I know this is sort of a non-answer, but your question requires a lot more specifics and we dont have them yet.

HTH

Victor

smartin · ‎04-09-2009

Victor thanks for the response. We currently have 52 remote offices that have connection speeds anywhere from a 512 to T1. Our corporate office has a 12 MB connection. ALL remote offices come throw the 12 MB pipe for internal applications (Telnet, Pop3, Smtp, as well Http for Internet access (this way we can control with Websense & QOS polices).

Within the next month or so ALL of our remote offices will be upgraded to a full T1. Management wanted to know how much port speed we would need at corporate 24 MB ? Full DS3 ?

Again I understand the different factors you have stated but was looking for a simple guide to start. Again thanks for the response !

lamav · ‎04-09-2009

Stephen:

Place a sniffer on the headquarters side and get a reading on how much bandwidth is presently being utilized.

Now, that part isn't a mystery. Thats easily done.

If you are using 30% of your link now, why would you want to add any bandwidth at all? If youre expecting growth, more applications, etc, then maybe, yes.

HTH

Please rate all posts you found helpful.

Victor