| How Much Bandwidth is
Enough?
CONTENTS:
How
Each Dollar Is Spent
An amazing 93
percent of your IT dollars are spent on software,
network migration costs, and operations. The actual
hardware, the information highway (road), represents
only 5 percent of your investment!
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The
Cost of Lost Productivity
Downtime! The
cost of downtime can significantly effect productivity
and cause all types of frustration throughout an
organization.
The average Fortune 1000 company estimates over one hour
of downtime per week.
A company with
more than 1,000 employees can expect to lose an average
of almost $27 million a year due to network downtime.
Quantifying the
actual cost of losses for your organization may
deliberately elude you, and trying to identify the root
causes probably has led to many long days and nights.
The reality is, the majority (over 60 percent) of
network downtime or loss productivity, is caused by some
aspect of your network cabling infrastructure.
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Ever
Increasing Need for More Bandwidth
Moore's Law
(PC speeds double every 18 months) applies to bandwidth.
Existing and new network applications evolve to embrace
high-resolution graphics, video and other rich media
data types: pressure is growing at the desktop, the
server, the hub and switch for increased bandwidth.
There is no telling where your LAN/WAN is headed other
than it is going to get increasingly faster, and more
populated!
- PC speeds
double every 16 months
- 80 percent
of LAN traffic now reaches the backbone; a few years
ago only 20 percent did.
- There has
been a tenfold increase in Ethernet traffic every 2
years
- The number
of nodes on the average network will double in the
next two years
- Forecasts
call for 18 billion Gigabit Ethernet ports by the
year 2006
Keeping abreast
of all the advances in computing technology such as VOIP,
Layer 4 switching, 100BASE-T, 1000BASE-T, VLAN, and
Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) are critical to the
network planning process and vital to the success of
your corporate network.
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How
to Optimize Your Throughput
Typically, when
IT professionals thinks about optimizing throughput they
think about "baselineing" a system to find out
the source of all the traffic errors and unnecessary
data. Essentially, one has to find, monitor and diagnose
the problem, then work on various solutions.
IT decision-makers have little time to proactively
observe their network and determine if a NIC card is
failing or a HUB is going bad. Rather, they are called
into action to solve issues and alleviate the burgeoning
bandwidth bottlenecks. Only upon close monitoring, and
time, does one find, via a process of elimination and
experience, what ailments are caused by what symptoms.
So you treat the issue with the remedies you have
available; you share, route, switch, replace various
pieces of hardware, reconfigure or segment your LAN, or
migrate to a higher-speed network. Most of these
treatments require some type of capital outlay out of
your budget and may not address the root cause of the
issue.
Keep in mind, the vast majority of bandwidth throughput
issues that are being addressed today take place on
networks running 10Base-T or switched 100Base-T.
Just imagine when you run full-duplex 1000Base-T…
Another road less traveled in optimizing bandwidth and
overall network performance is to look at the very
information highway that your data travels over. In
order for your high-performance data network to run at
ever increasing speeds the "road" must be in
race condition. If we take this analogy one step
further, all aspects of your road including the
off-ramps must be in similar race condition.
Your cabling plant, from the hub, patch cord,
patch-panel, horizontal cable, wall outlet, and patch
cord, to workstation must work well together. Each
component mentioned has physical performance values,
most notably impedance. The impedance values of each
connection point and media when matched with similar
components performs at its optimal. Having products
mated together that are not "tuned" to work
together causes reduced throughput. Physical performance
of each component, operating in unison (tuned),
optimizes your throughput and reduces network errors.
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How
to Maximize Your Return on Investment
It is mission
critical that today's information systems professional
understand the latest technologies and also understand
how to avoid spending 30 percent of every dollar on
non-revenue producing expenses. In order to do this;
technology investments must be viewed as assets with a
useful life, or life cycle. Up-front cost vs.
lifecycle investment is really the choice, each having
its merits.
If you are planning on being in your facility for a
short period of time (18 months) and have minimal
technology upgrade needs (10Base-T) then maximizing your
investment may be to buy a lower performance network
infrastructure.
If on the other hand, you just signed a ten year lease,
are having a building built, plan on growing, view
technology as a strategic competitive advantage, and
want to guard against obsolescence, you should be
compelled to design and recommend a robust
infrastructure with room to grow (headroom).
The reality is,
over 50 percent of network problems are caused by only about
2 percent of your investment (cabling system or physical layer),
your cabling infrastructure also has the longest life-cycle.
Keep IT all in perspective, invest for the future: your entire
network rests on it!
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