On Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:29:16 -0000, "Lee, Steven (NSG Malaysia)" said:

Hi all, may I know how you guys measure the network equipment usage effectiveness? (...) Is there any tools other there can measure this?

Step 0: Define "effectiveness". The problem is that quite often, decisions on whether to buy now or later are driven by non-network issues like budget and cash flow, which can't be measured by any network monitoring tools. For instance, I have a high-visibility project that demonstrated the ability to fully saturate a 1GigE port (if you can't design a file server that can flood a 1Gig port, you're in the wrong business :). The design called for multiple 10GigE. But when I'll actually *get* the ports depends on a different internal group, and they have to trade off things like "Do we spend Fiscal 2008 money we're low on to get this project going *now*, or wait a few weeks and spend Fiscal 2009 money?" and "Do we buy a very limited amount of 10GigE gear for piloting this project but possibly find it doesn't fit in our long-term 10Gig plans, or delay the port provisioning until we know what we're doing long term?". If anybody has a tool that handles *those* questions, feel free to let me know. ;)