<henneld@notredameprep.com> wrote:
>We are looking at Cymphonix Network Composer (www.cymphonix.com) as a
>solution to help shape our internet traffic and maximize our limited
>bandwidth.
>
>Our main goal is to prioritize teachers and educational web use over the
>non-educational web traffic (streaming media ,ect) that is currently
>taking place on campus. Ultimately I would also like to retire my linux
>web proxy (squid) and would look to this device for our content
>filtering as well.
>
If the only thing your interested in is making the most of your bandwidth to
provide the best connection for the most users I think the NetEqualizer
(http://www.netequalizer.com/) is worth a look. When faced with a major bill
for upgrading our Packeteer we decided to give the much less expensive
NetEqualizer a try. In a nutshell, this box takes a protocol agnostic
approach to managing traffic by progressively slowing down the top users
once your traffic hits a percentage of you connection's bandwidth (ours
kicks in at 85%). What's cool is that low bandwidth users or users with
short bursty traffic (e.g. most HTTP traffic) are completely unaffected no
matter what the load. We've used it since September and we see a much fairer
distribution of bandwidth among users (rarely is anyone over 2% of the total
bandwidth) and higher utilization on our connection so we are using all the
bandwidth we pay for. Because of it's simplicity setting it up and learning
how to configure it is a 4 hour job.
The box does contain ability to prioritize individual hosts (e.g. servers,
video conferencing hardware, etc.) as well as the ability to set hard
bandwidth caps on specific hosts or vlans.
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
http://www.peddie.org
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