Hi all, may I know how you guys measure the network equipment usage effectiveness? In what situation you will buy new network equipment instead of using the existing equipment? Any clue to share? Should we only upgrade/replace the equipment once the max PPS is reached? Is there any tools other there can measure this?
Regards,
Steven Lee
Step 0: Define "effectiveness".
The problem is that quite often, decisions on whether to buy now or later
are driven by non-network issues like budget and cash flow, which can't be
measured by any network monitoring tools.
For instance, I have a high-visibility project that demonstrated the ability to
fully saturate a 1GigE port (if you can't design a file server that can flood a
1Gig port, you're in the wrong business :). The design called for multiple
10GigE. But when I'll actually *get* the ports depends on a different internal
group, and they have to trade off things like "Do we spend Fiscal 2008 money
we're low on to get this project going *now*, or wait a few weeks and spend
Fiscal 2009 money?" and "Do we buy a very limited amount of 10GigE gear for
piloting this project but possibly find it doesn't fit in our long-term 10Gig
plans, or delay the port provisioning until we know what we're doing long
term?".
If anybody has a tool that handles *those* questions, feel free to let
me know. 