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FOLLOWING MY RECENT columns on the need to plan for sufficient bandwidth and the pipeline crunch we face in 1997, I saw a series of reports about how many of the regional Bell operating companies are or are about to be - out of capacity. Talk about bad timing: This occurs just as network demand was about to really take off.
Effective capacity planning is still one part science, two parts magic, and the rest good luck. Because of the growth rate of LANs and WANs, trying to keep up with the demand is a never-ending struggle. In earlier columns I suggested using distributed protocol analyzers to establish a baseline reading of your network's performance and then to periodically repeat the process to determine the rate of traffic growth.
Many of the distributed monitoring systems transmit updated information from the remote nodes to a central repository - over the...