The Need for Bandwidth Management

Almost all network links are used by more than one user or application. This means that the available bandwidth has to be shared between them. Bandwidth management tools let you manage how this is done.

If a network link is continuously congested, the link needs to be upgraded to provide greater capacity. In many cases, however, the typical load on a link is within the link capacity, and the link is congested only temporarily. Temporary congestion is sometimes predictable; for example, there are typically peaks in network use at particular times of the day or following a particular event. Other causes of temporary congestion, such as the transfer of a large file, are not possible to predict.

If the average use of a link is within the link capacity, you can make considerable improvements in the performance of the network link by managing how the available bandwidth capacity is used. Allocating bandwidth to a particular type of traffic enables you to optimize the usage of the available bandwidth.

Solaris Bandwidth Manager 1.5 enables you to manage the bandwidth used by IP traffic. It does this by:

• Allocating traffic to a class based on the application type, source and destination addresses, URL group, or a combination, then assigning individual limits for each class. For example:

  • Traffic to Engineering must have at least 50% of the link.

  • HTTP traffic cannot exceed 10% of the link.

• Prioritizing traffic. Some types of traffic, for example interactive traffic generated when using telnet or rlogin, need a quick response time. Solaris Bandwidth Manager lets you assign a higher priority to that traffic. Traffic that does not require a quick response time, such as a file transfer using FTP, can be assigned a lower priority.

  By balancing the bandwidth allocated to different types of network traffic and the relative priorities, you can optimize your network performance.