Be prepared for decreased productivity. A multi-megabyte e-mail attachment could very well cause your e-mail server to swamp a slow WAN for minutes. Users might not be able to access resources they need, and that downtime equates to a monetary loss.
Also consider whether you can do QoS with existing equipment. Many firewall and router vendors, for example, offer bandwidth-control capabilities for their devices for free or a modest upgrade cost. Radware and Cisco routers have this feature, Nortel provides shaping on its Contivity VPN concentrator, and Check Point firewalls have the company's Floodgate bandwidth manager. These devices may be good enough for your environment, making a separate standalone QoS device unnecessary. But again, dig a bit deeper: Bandwidth shaping costs CPU time, so the device's performance may degrade. Also, the granularity of control, such as regulating individual connections, may not be up to the level of a standalone device.
Maybe a compromise is in order: Some QoS-device vendors sell monitor-only solutions that let you graph the dominant protocols; you can then use your existing infrastructure devices for shaping. This is a reasonable solution: If your existing devices have the shaping features and performance to work with your traffic, you're ahead of the game. Worst case, you upgrade the monitor-only product to a full-fledged traffic shaper.
R E V I E W
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