I put in Packeteer PacketShapers (now BlueCoat PacketShapers). With a policy/proceedure for adding business required external hosted applications/web sites.
Everything else dropped into a general use category, except for streaming media. The big thing is that without shaping, you get bad performance when you hit about 80% utilization. With shaping, we were able to use 100% of our bandwidth, and not get a single complaint. It worked wonders, when they installed MPLS. That made everyone's default route point to a single gateway, instead of the closest one. No-one realized it, except for us network guys that were watching the graphs. unix_fan wrote: > 1. I think you should force all outbound to go through a daily > authenticated proxy, so that there is a clear connection between > originating IP and individual users. > 2. To me this is the very similar to dealing with disk hogs. Make a list > of your bandwidth hogs. Decide on objective metrics that you will use to > declare the hogs (connect time? MB downloaded?). > 3. Based on those metrics, decide on the threshold that will be > considered excessive. > 4. Inform the population about the problem (bandwidth at peak endangers > business need traffic). Inform the population that excessive bandwidth > use will automatically be reported to management. > 5. After some culling for false positives (e.g., somebody downloading GB > of EDA applications legitimately), start reporting the excessive use to > appropriate management. Do it in small manageable batches (e.g., here > are your top ten Internet users this week). Some managers will be > genuinely surprised and will decide that some of the employees have > extra time on their hands. The problem will be mitigated. > > > --- On *Wed, 4/29/09, Jeremy Charles /<[email protected]>/* wrote: > > From: Jeremy Charles <[email protected]> > Subject: [lopsa-discuss] Buy More Internet versus Mitigating > Internet Use > To: "Lopsa Discuss" <[email protected]> > Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2009, 3:07 PM > > I don't want to get on yet another salesdroid's radar, so I'm asking > the community instead. :-) > > We're repeatedly faced with a situation where we purchase more Internet > capacity, our employees eventually oversubscribe it, we buy more, lather, > rinse, > repeat. Currently, we're purchasing 40 Mbps of Internet from our ISP, > and > the ISP's router guy tells me that his router typically sees about 60 Mbps > of traffic actually trying to come to us. (We're mostly an eyeball > network.) > > I'm tempted to look in to purchasing something like a Websense product or > other mechanism for, shall we say, reducing the appetite for non-business > Internet use during prime business hours. The big question I first want > to get > a feel for is: Will the cost of the system be made up in terms of > reduced need > to purchase more Internet capacity? > > Would anybody mind sharing order-of-magnitude numbers on what you had to > pay in > order to get something that did a good job at this and how much reduction > in > Internet usage you think it resulted in? > > > Yes, I realize that you also have to factor in things like lost > productivity > due to web surfing, security risks that the device could also reduce, > etc. > That's all fine and good, but it's rather impossible to > put those > concepts in to hard numbers that I can put on a purchase proposal. I need > something that I can sell to Layer 8, which is currently running in "cost > paranoid" mode. > > > ---- > Jeremy Charles > Epic's Computer and Technology Services Division > [email protected] > Phone: 608-271-9000 Fax: 608-410-5961 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
