Not enough bandwidth to the Internet?
If money is no object, the simple solution is to buy a bigger pipe or purchase WAN acceleration gear. Often this solves the problem, but other times it exacerbates the issue.
Without historical information on what is traveling over these expensive Internet pipes, bad practices can become worse and what’s more, they can spread.
A more sensible approach, therefore, is to use a packet analyzer or flow analysis software to find out what is hogging the bandwidth and if it is a valid application.
Many routers to the Internet are fed by multiple LAN connections. Deploying packet analyzers to capture snapshots on each of these connections can be inconvenient, time consuming and overwhelming. Activating NetFlow monitoring on all the ports is far simpler.
Most routers today support either NetFlow or IP Flow Information Export IPFIX, an Internet Engineering Task Force protocol based on NetFlow v9. Developed by Cisco Systems, NetFlow is part of the router's operating system which monitors IP communications passing through the router and summarizes the traffic. Each summarized conversation can involve thousands of packets.
The router then sends the data on up to 30 conversations in a single packet off to the NetFlow Analyzer – a central server or PC with storage, analysis and reporting software that collects the data from all the routers. Most of the packet details are removed, making which lowers the overhead, but there are still enough details to tell who was sending what, when and where. An inexpensive NetFlow analyzer - such as ntop from ntop.org or Scrutinizer from plixer.com – quickly shows the net admin which users and applications are behind bottlenecks. Critical traffic can be rerouted, non-critical traffic rescheduled off hours and non-business traffic cancelled.
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"While experiencing severe T3 latency, Scrutinizer was instrumental in analyzing our T3 bandwidth bottlenecks," said Emmanuel Thesatus of PacMid Technologies.
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Routinely taking a few minutes to check for unauthorized traffic over an expensive connection is good practice. The word spreads that the IT team is watching for abuse and eventually the problems start to diminish, though they may not completely disappear. It probably won't drop traffic enough to allow you to downsize the pipes, but keeping people from creating YouTube traffic can delay costly upgrades.
Even if the problem traffic has been removed from the leased lines, valid WAN traffic will still grow over time. Rather than leasing bigger pipes, check out WAN acceleration solutions from Cisco, Riverbed and Expand. Most of these devices also support NetFlow, allowing a before and after view of the effects of WAN acceleration.
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How have you solved your bottleneck issues?
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Brad Reese cofounded BradReese.Com Cisco Refurbished which offers one year warranties on Cisco Refurbished and Cisco Repair.
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