If you answered yes to having Used Dantel equipment, you know how great their products can be for running a well-maintained network. You are probably also aware, however, of how expensive purchasing new Dantel items can be for a large deployment. Your budget probably only allows for you to do any serious overhaul work on your devices every few years, but any experienced system administrator knows that the burdens of limited bandwidth and increased data consumption are problems that need to be addressed every single day. People unversed in technology, namely your supervisors, want you to deliver a top-notch network performance on a shoe-string budget without understanding how unreasonable that actually is for you and your team. But unless you want to see yourself out on the street after having been replaced by a third-party monitoring and maintenance service, you have to figure out some ways to keep everyone happy short of giving them all new laptops.
Your first project for improving speeds may be to examine whether or not you have the money, time and resources to make the leap to optical access. If your office is located in an industrial district, the odds are good that optical cabling may already exist and be available for your building. Rural properties, on the other hand, have a lower chance of being ready to plug into the high-speed network. You can call local data providers to find out if an optical connection is available and for what kind of prices. Keep in mind that this technology has long been heralded as the next great innovation in internet connectivity, only to be slowly developed and completely disregarded at certain points during the past decade. Sticking with the T1 or T3 connection you are using now means you won’t have to completely reconfigure your entry point machinery, a process that would invariably entail contacting used Aastra vendors hoping to supply you with used gateway and bridging equipment for affordable prices.
If a number of users are complaining about slow upload and download rates, it may not be your incoming line that is causing problems. If your user base is under a couple hundred machines, half of which may be operating at any given time, there is no reason a solid T1 line can’t adequately handle all of their requests. There are a few different things you can investigate if bandwidth does not seem to be evenly distributed throughout the office. First, calculate the ratio of access points to machines connected. Overburdening one AP with too many machines will cause it to address traffic in a disproportional manner, putting some users well ahead of others for data retrieval. This problem can be worsened if you are using the same servers for outside web access and in-house email access. The best way to improve speed is by assigning different types of requests to different servers. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to setup your own email server stack to ease the overall load of traffic. used Tyco hardware is cheap and readily available for this very purpose.
You can also consider putting bandwidth throttling measures in place so that people downloading too much material will be forced to wait longer times if they plan on keeping it up. Instead of allowing the guy seeding the entire Emerson, Lake and Palmer discography in FLAC format see speeds like one or two megabytes a second, limit him to just a couple hundred kilobytes. The odds are good that he will become disenchanted with the low speed and stop helping his other prog-rock friends use your network to download pretentious, horribly dated schlock. If you do suspect users of conducting illegal activity, such as piracy, you should keep records of it and notify your superiors. Any violation of whatever terms of service the company has in place can result in immediate termination. It is your job to report infractions.
Additional changes to your overall network structure can include improving the state of your server room so you get a longer life out of the machines. Keeping the temperature and humidity in this space regulated will go a long way in preventing servers from becoming overheated and damaged. Single-room air conditioning units are not that expensive, either, and will keep your sweaty staff cool all year long. If security and unauthorized access is a point of concern, consider implementing a keycard system whereby you can keep track of the people coming and going. All the data encryption in the world will not stop someone from physically tampering with your machines