How to measure network equipment usage effectiveness?

Tue Jun 2 04:07:55 UTC 2009

On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:29:16 -0000, "Lee, Steven (NSG Malaysia)" said:

> Hi all, may I know how you guys measure the network equipment usage
> effectiveness? (...) Is there any tools other there can measure this?

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. ;)

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