[svlug] bandwidth for SOHO with ~25 users?

[Sargun Dhillon]

Hm, well, this is an interesting question. There are several ways to solve it:
A) Throw more bandwidth at the problem: Buy a point to point link to
the colo and use the colo's internet pipe as your primary bandwidth
B) QoS: Become Comcast. Start QoSing different types of traffic
up/down/all around
C) Link Agg: Buy 3-4 links and aggregate them at the colo, you can do
this over public IP, or you can do this over private PtPs.
D) Load balance over multiple DSL lines

I've done all these things before, so remember if you need a
consultant there is always one around the corner.
You might look at purchasing something like:
http://www.sonic.net/sales/businesst/

Anyways, tell us more about your cost restraints.

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 2:59 PM, Luke S Crawford <lsc at prgmr.com> wrote:
> "Joachim Rosenfeld" <joerosenfeld at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I recently inherited a SOHO network as part of a production sysadmin
>> gig.
>>
>> Basic problem: our network is slow...
>>
>> We have 2 T1s out to the public Internet and a point to point T1 going
>> straight to our colo.
>>
>> The T1 going to the colo is almost never utilized, the 2 T1s for the
>> office is almost always saturated during the day.
>
> Your users are doing more than 'just surfing' if they are using 3Mbps
> most of the time.
>
> 2 ways to solve this problem.
>
> 1. get more bandwidth.
>
> If you get rid of the 2 T1s to the Internet, and replace them
> with, say 4 or 6 DSL lines (from at least 2 different providers, and keeping
> the line to your co-lo as an 'emergency backup') you will have a lot more
> bandwidth, at a much lower cost.
>
> (splitting the users up amongst the DSL lines can be done many different
> ways.  An interesting discussion in and of itself, but it's pretty easy
> if you only want to balance traffic that originates locally.  Balancing
> externally originated connections, on the other hand, is much more difficult,
> unless dns is fast enough for you.)
>
> 2. keep your users from downloading crap.  This is easy enough to do
> if you have a grumpy admin standing by that can see where the traffic is
> coming from.    Just walk over to the offending desk and growl a bit.
> If the SysAdmin isn't sufficiently grumpy, the boss can do it.  Either way,
> if you properly apply the pressure, it is a viable solution.
>
> (sometimes downloading crap is part of the job, but usually that much
> bandwidth means someone is using 'Internet radio' or watching youtube
> videos, etc...  Not to say it's bad, just that you can't do it if you
> want to run the office off bandwidth that costs what it does over a T1.)
>
> The best option, if you have the routing brains available, is to do both,
> keep a T1, and buy a few DSL lines.  Do policy routing at the nat that
> sends important traffic down the T1 and other crap down the DSL lines.
>
>
>> For those of you that admin office networks, how much bandwidth do you
>> have?
>
> I don't at the moment;  last time I did, ~2 years ago, we had 4 T1 lines for
> around 50 people, but the office was entirely VoIP, and most of those
> people were phone support.  We heavily prioritized the VoIP packets, and if
> we neared saturation, we'd figure out who was doing it and make them stop,
> as a matter of policy.
>
> Before that we did the multiple DSL lines thing... but we balanced in the
> dhcp.conf file (sending some users to one gateway, some to the other)
> dead simple-  too simple of a setup to send our VoIP packets down the T1 line.
>
> Also, setting up a Squid server helps a lot when it comes to perceived latency,
> even if it's not going to save you that much bandwidth.   If you are a
> webdev shop, it also encourages your developers to use proper cache headers,
> which is a big win if you want to put a squid server in front of your actual
> servers.
>
> (most of your bandwidth is probably used by streaming media, which probably
> isn't going to be cached, so the bandwidth savings will be minimal, but
> popular pages will load in an eyeblink, so the impression of 'the Internet
> is broken' will be greatly diminished.)
>
> prioritizing tcp/80 also usually helps some, because much of the bulk download
> junk (youtube, Internet radio)  runs on different ports.
>
> _______________________________________________
> svlug mailing list
> svlug at lists.svlug.org
> http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/svlug
>