General Office requirements

With the heavy traffic portion of the network squared away, lets look at the other side of the network. Figure 5 shows the third group of clients: Marketing. This group pretty much hits the average in terms of number of clients per group (there were a couple with 20 there were a couple with 10). Also, all the Designers belonged to the Marketing department and represented the maximum size file transfers of any of the general office staff.

Figure 5: Marketing Clients Chart.

As you can see, with the Marketing group I had a little bit more flexibility when dealing with the number of clients per switch. Figuring each Media editor was transferring approximately 1.33 GB per minute and each Marketing client was only hitting about 200 MB an hour, I figured I'd be more than safe raising the number of clients per switch by 125 percent. First, though, I need to backtrack to where I came up with that 200MB per hour figure.

As an engineer with ten years worth of experience and an absolute business professional, I would like to tell you I chose my Test Client at random... I did not. "Mary" was chosen because her eyes were the deepest shade of blue that I had ever seen before. After a week of running around the warehouse and tripping over suede footrests and, what I can only hope were imitation Salvidor Dali sculptures, I found that whenever I was anywhere near Mary I couldn't look at anything else. So why not drag her into the network auditing process?

As it turned out, Mary was the Marketing CIO and head designer in charge of putting together everything from movie posters to promotional material. As luck would have it, she also had a lot of work to do. So I connected her laptop to one of the first available Marketing switches and began to monitor her network utilization.

Figure 6: The latest version of Adventnet's OpManager.

OpManager is a wonderful program that I just happened to stumble upon in a Google AdSense link. It allows you to monitor the CPU, disk, and memory usuage as well as the receive and transmit traffic on any client, group of clients, server, switch or router on your network. You can drill down to a single client, pull up every client on your network or look at all the clients connected to a particular switch. A program was almost custom-made for what I needed.

Mary had a ton of e-mail waiting for her concerning a film that was due to be shown in less that two weeks at the debut of the film festival. I asked her to describe the sizes of her file transfers as they came in. She received a 20 MB still image that had been captured from one of the movie frames. She also received several PDF files between 5-10 MB each. She responded to each of these emails, sometimes with an attached Word document with corrections and suggestions for the press release. Her job for the day was to come up with a full-sized publicity poster for the film. So she used the 20 MB scan as the centerpiece and designed text and figures around it eventually coming up with a two day average of 200 MB an hour.

This was more or less consistent with what the average Accountant and Finance Administrator was pulling, from constantly creating and saving invoices to the Accounting Server, bringing-up older invoices, and sorting and archiving the invoice directories. The Sales and Legal departments could pull in more or less on any given day (depending on what was going on at that particular time) but they all basically averaged out to be the same. So the whole thing was now rolling.

My biggest question at this point, was whether it would be better to offload the ninety or so Office workers onto a seperate network from the 20 heavy load Media clients. There are about a hundred and sixteen million ways that this can be done. They range from the basics of setting up a VLAN, to dividing the network into seperate subnets, to the extreme of putting a seperate switch on the Domain Controller and the Backup Domain controller and essentially running two different networks with absolutely no further stress on the Primary Domain Controller.

So now that all the file servers and all the clients were finally in place, I could see what the actual load on the network was and use that information to guide my next step. Since OpManager allowed me to view the total utilization of every device on the network at the same time, it was the natural choice. Keep in mind that we've got 20 Media computers doing upwards 1600 GB worth of transfer per hour and another 90 Office clients clocking in a maximum of about 200 MB per hour each.

I was stunned: Overall network utilization never went above eight percent! I had been monitoring the network utilization every half hour on all the servers via Windows Task manager since the loads hitting the Media servers were the highest at any given point on the network. But for the rest of the office, network utilization rarely ever reached one percent, and the Domain controller network utilization never went about eleven. Since most of the heavy traffic occured between the Media file servers and their clients, the overall utilization was pretty low.

Tags: gigabit, LAN,

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