Contain a Greedy Business Application

Procedures to manage bandwidth allocation for applications that are important but not urgent, and tend to swell to consume more than their fair share of bandwidth

Some of the types of traffic that fall in this category include FTP, email with large attachments, and print. Although this traffic needs efficient and predictable performance, it can't be allowed to impact the performance of urgent, interactive, and mission-critical applications.

The following procedures are all appropriate to contain bandwidth-hungry, non-urgent applications, but the first is essential:

• Enforce a bandwidth limit on the total of all the greedy, non-urgent traffic you want to control.
  For example, limit all file transfer traffic to 10 percent of WAN capacity.
  
  
• Subdivide capped bandwidth for subsets of the greedy, non-urgent traffic.
  For example, if you already limited email to 15 percent of your capacity, you could then reserve half of that 15 percent for email to or from the Sales department.
  
  
• Insulate users of the same application from each other.
  For example, if you already limited print traffic to 10 percent of capacity, you could then prevent one high-capacity user from taking most of it with a single print job, leaving others waiting.