Work poor local network speed - Help me reply to my boss

[akirru]

Hi all,

I have started as IT specialist at an organisation which have chosen to limit their ports on their avaya switches to 100mb/s (which leaves us with a local network transfer of 10mb/s) and I find this unacceptable. I have asked to have the ports changes to auto negotiate and allow the device to choose what it wants. Any devices that have a problem with that could be set manually. I' am constantly told that the reasoning behind this was to stop the wifi network being saturated as the local server only has a 1gb/s connections to the lan.

I can't see any real reasoning to limit the network in this way ....

A quote from an email I received from central IT ( the guy showed an example recommend by Microsoft for remote machines access ... which has nothing to do with local lan speed ). Help me reply

Reasoning behind this as follows:

• Servers will still be on 1Gbps connections. The new ones have three Gbps connections ‘split’ between 5 VMs. Even if they had 10Gbps cards (they don’t) the switches from memory don’t have 10Gbps ports available for client use
• 1Gbps connections client side *may* hog the available bandwidth to the wireless clients; that was the prior reasoning by the comms team to downgrade the wired clients to 100Mbps

Contrary to the above performance may be increased if the switches are predominantly doing unicast traffic as opposed to multicast or broadcast; if the servers communication is switching quickly between clients as opposed to pushing to a group simultaneously I assume the connections will use the available bandwidth for that connection instance. My knowledge of exactly how this works in reality is at best hazy though and from second hand conversations with comms; I understand why Matt wants to do this properly as opposed to switching the clients to 1Gbps and hoping for the best.



The planned internet bandwidth increase to 1Gbps will help however.



One other thing to note, comments in teams regarding how 100Mb client connections are slow by today’s standards, these are the recommendations by Microsoft only last year.



https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/network-guidance



For internet access, *High* quality streaming on iplayer only requires 5Mbps (1.5Mbps standard)



Apart from perhaps SCCM imaging, I’d be surprised if your wired clients are hitting the 100Mbps limit often.



Thanks

 

[ColinTaylor]

So they're using the switches as a kind of bandwidth limiter because the servers don't have to capacity to handle the increased traffic if the clients were gigabit. That's actually not too unreasonable (without knowing the precise topology of the LAN). I would agree with their main point that they don't just want to switch all the clients over to gigabit and hope for the best. That's not an acceptable approach for a business. I think what they should be doing is monitoring the load on the servers over time and from that they should be able to predict whether they could handle the increase in traffic.

P.S. I'm not sure what you meant by "which leaves us with a local network transfer of 10mb/s", or did you mean 10MB/s?

 

[akirru]

Hi Colin,

thanks for your reply and you make some really valid points. But this organisation encompasses around 1500 users in my building alone. I understand using the lan to control the amount of bandwidth. But don't most modern switches traffic shape anyway and you can implement things like QOS.

At the moment downloading one - 4 gig file from the internet saturates my network. If I start PXEBoot'ing a lot of machine at once it crashes my sccm server.

In my building we have 4 switch stacks all with 48 ports and a server room with 2 dedicated servers. We are about to upgrade the internet to 1 gig but it seems pointless if we are limiting clients via lan as opposed to proper traffic shaping. Correct me if I 'am wrong

Cheers

P.S. I'm not sure what you meant by "which leaves us with a local network transfer of 10mb/s", or did you mean 10MB/s?

No I'm referring to the fact if I transfer a file from the server it maxes out at 10 megabytes a second.

 

[ColinTaylor]

The devil is in the network detail (which I can't possibly know). For an organisation that large I'd agree that you'd expect the switches to be configured as gigabit. The switches themselves don't do traffic shaping. If the servers are really the problem then any shaping that's required should be applied in front of them leaving the rest of the network to operate at full speed. But again, the devil is in the detail and I don't know your topology or traffic flows. They also allude to some sort of issue with wireless devices. Again, I don't know how they fit into the picture.

No I'm referring to the fact if I transfer a file from the server it maxes out at 10 megabytes a second.

Yes that's what I thought, megabytes (MB) not megabits (Mb) or millibits (mb).

 

[follower]

Hi all,

I have started as IT specialist at an organisation which have chosen to limit their ports on their avaya switches to 100mb/s (which leaves us with a local network transfer of 10mb/s) and I find this unacceptable. I have asked to have the ports changes to auto negotiate and allow the device to choose what it wants. Any devices that have a problem with that could be set manually. I' am constantly told that the reasoning behind this was to stop the wifi network being saturated as the local server only has a 1gb/s connections to the lan.

I can't see any real reasoning to limit the network in this way ....

A quote from an email I received from central IT ( the guy showed an example recommend by Microsoft for remote machines access ... which has nothing to do with local lan speed ). Help me reply

1. It means your company doesn't want to spend the money to buy proper a Backbone and other switches.
2. Some traffics should be blocked for network speed and stability by a Firewall. He is talking about 'Unicast Flooding'.
3. Your network system has Flooding issue.
So your company network system should be rebuilt with new devices or topology.

 

[Tech9]

Help me reply

You don't have to reply. This is not your network. I have an IT guy who does what I want him to do. He'll be replaced, if he doesn't.

 

[akirru]

To be fair Tech9 I agree with what you are saying and that I should stay within the bounds of my role. But the problem is, I' am responsible for this site. The management at this site employ me separately from the main organisation. It's a really weird setup.

I come from a networking background I don't have access to the switches to even change ports. We have a horrible process that includes using a terrible ticketing system. So they make choices and decisions that don't make sense for my network and don't even run it by us. In fact worse of all some of the people making decisions on these things aren't even from an IT or tech background.....

 

[Tech9]

But the problem is, I' am responsible for this site.

Run it the way they want it. Give them suggestions and let them decide.

 

[follower]

To be fair Tech9 I agree with what you are saying and that I should stay within the bounds of my role. But the problem is, I' am responsible for this site. The management at this site employ me separately from the main organisation. It's a really weird setup.

I come from a networking background I don't have access to the switches to even change ports. We have a horrible process that includes using a terrible ticketing system. So they make choices and decisions that don't make sense for my network and don't even run it by us. In fact worse of all some of the people making decisions on these things aren't even from an IT or tech background.....

So the conclusion is you can do nothing.