The most recurrent and expensive part of any network is bandwidth. I happen to go through an article which mostly discussed about how you can improve your enterprise bandwidth management. (Thought I should share this with you all)
Obviously the easy way out is to buy more bandwidth, especially now when most of the service providers have reduced the bandwidth prices. But is that an affordable solution always!!! Because in the due course the prices might crawl back up…Is there anything that we can do about bandwidth without shelling-out more dollars?
Refer to our whitepaper on “Slow Applications Despite Frequent Bandwidth Upgrades?”
Here are some key find outs…
1. Limit Email to Text: Though it seems simple to have all the mail in Text only format, when compare to HTML or both, certainly this will save a huge amount of bandwidth. (Think every email across your organization and the amount of bandwidth used to load those thick graphics….!)
“Restricting email to text is an obvious way [to save bandwidth] that no one does,” Skorupa says. “In the body of an email, there are almost always rich forwarding, graphics, company logos, and everything else when, instead, just plain-old everyday text will work fine.”
If you use Outlook, you can even try the suggestion below. (After-all no one reads all the emails that is delivered to their mail client 
)
Activate cache mode for email clients.
One way enterprises can free up bandwidth is by running their email clients in cache mode, says Joe Skorupa, a research vice president for Gartner. “Outlook has a cache mode that only downloads stuff when you look at it,” he says. “When you do that, you don’t get that crunch the first thing in the morning when people turn on their PCs.”
2. Get Policies To Work: Most of the employees never prefer this option. Rather, you can prioritize your traffic giving no room for social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc… to bog down your business critical application traffic.
Check out our recent blog on “Are social networking sites guzzling your company bandwidth?”
3. Analyze bandwidth usage: “You can’t manage what you can’t see”, it is true even to bandwidth management. Use network traffic analysis tools that can help you get indepth information about your network, like which user or application is using the traffic. Interestingly at times, even the user might not know that he is clogging the network. Being the network administrator, you can find and correct these situations before it becomes a crisis.
With the combination of OpManager and its NetFlow plug-in, you can now analyze the network traffic to know which application or user is occupying the traffic, in addition to the router health and bandwidth utilization monitoring.
Learn more on using OpManager for Network Performance Management or Click here to try a 30 day free trial.
See you with more tips on network monitoring and management.
-Kalvin
Team OpManager – The Network Monitoring Software from ManageEngine
Network Performance Management | Server Performance Management | Network Fault Management | Network Performance Reports | Distributed Network Monitoring
