When to Use Solaris Bandwidth Manager

Without any form of bandwidth management, it is difficult to maintain a network that has predictable performance characteristics. Nevertheless, this is how most networks are run today. Network usage is estimated or modeled, and then enough bandwidth is configured to achieve respectable latencies. Enough is a relative term, it could mean that there will always be sufficient bandwidth for all applications that would possibly need it, or it could mean that the network is oversubscribed, knowing that on average only a certain percentage of users is actually using the network. When new applications are deployed, or existing applications become more popular, links become congested and users start complaining about slow application performance, until the network gets upgraded. For many customer environments, this is a completely acceptable way to maintain network resources. New technologies such as switched networking equipment and gigabit ethernet have rapidly become available at continuously decreasing prices.

Deploying any type of QoS solution is no magical fix to a bandwidth shortage on the network, and the term Quality in Quality of Service is subjective. When the network is overloaded, bandwidth management software can help determine which network traffic to penalize more in respect to other (more important) traffic. If the network is not oversubscribed, then deploying bandwidth management might be a futile exercise, since there is no network bandwidth shortage to begin with.

However, many networks are oversubscribed, and critical network services might be affected during peak loads on the network. The Solaris Bandwidth Manager software can help define which network services are more important than others, and set priorities and bandwidth percentages to enforce them so these services are not negatively impacted by other, less important traffic on the network.

In addition, the Solaris Bandwidth Manager software can be used for billing based on network usage. Clients who pay more can be offered a larger piece of the network bandwidth.

Relationship to Other Resource Management Products

The Solaris Bandwidth Manager software can be used along other resource management products to offer additional control over the available resources. Examples are:

• Solaris Resource Manager software for managing system resources such as CPU and memory. The Solaris Bandwidth Manager software can offer control over resources which are hard for SRM to manage, such as NFS.

• Sun Enterprise SyMON software as an encapsulating managing platform. The Solaris Bandwidth Manager software has SNMP support, and the Bandwidth Manager SNMP MIB can be loaded into SyMON, where monitoring rules and alarms can be configured.