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 Management Tools Justify Fast Ethernet, Gigabit | ||||
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By Kelly Jackson Higgins It began with some unusual incidents--users mysteriously dropping off the network, an FDDI card shutting down. But the diagnosis was no surprise: Parkedale Pharmaceuticals' FDDI backbone, with its 10-Mbps Ethernet connections, was saturated. The pharmaceutical company, formerly part of Parke-Davis and now owned by Bristol, Tenn.-based King Pharmaceuticals, next month will begin installing a proposed brand-new, dual-trunked Gigabit Ethernet backbone with 100-Mbps Ethernet connections to about 30 buildings on its main campus. During the planning, Parkedale used some of its current network management tools to help justify the move to a higher-speed network. "We were able to measure throughput and collisions with the data we gathered from our hub management software," says Tom Krawczyk, network supervisor for Parkedale in Rochester, Mich. "The hubs give us raw data that we download and analyze." Traffic jams on the Parkedale network intensified this year when the company purchased higher-capacity Microsoft Corp. NT Servers to replace its Novell NetWare servers, and upgraded its workstations to Windows95. "Now that the servers are faster, the network is our bottleneck," says Krawczyk. "The applications that we are moving to, like Outlook and Exchange, as well as more data-acquisition tools for our scientists, are putting more load on the network." Parkedale's proposed network, which will consist of six gigabit-speed switches to replace the FDDI core and 20 or so 100-Mbps Ethernet switches with gigabit uplinks, will pave the way for videoconferencing applications, allowing scientists on Parkedale's Rochester campus to collaborate on research with King's scientists in Bristol, in real time. Krawczyk and his team have measured traffic flows using the old standby, SNMP traps, embedded in the company's Cabletron Systems Spectrum Analyzer hub software. The SNMP-based data helped Parkedale support its move to Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet. Parkedale found that today it gets about 2 Mbps with 40 gigabytes of data, and uses about 56 man-hours to download data. "Then we calculated the throughput of 100-Mbps pipes: only one man-hour of downloading the same amount of information, nearly full throughput and a savings of $250,000," says Krawczyk. Parkedale expects to save another $290,000 in productivity losses due to outages or transmission errors, he says. Parkedale uses Intel's LANDesk for running its helpdesk and tracking desktop machines. LANDesk's DMI (Desktop Management Interface) helps the network team inventory new and existing software, as well as distribute upgrades. But the trade-off with more management data is just that--more data. "These nice new management products also eat up more bandwidth," Krawczyk says. The gigabit backbone will offer more headroom. Meanwhile, the Spectrum hubs aren't immune to outages with the existing network. "We sometimes lose a connection with the hub and can't get information," Krawczyk says. Parkedale will replace the hubs with high-speed switches, and deploy Web-based management tools to monitor traffic flow.
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