Measuring Bandwidth

We now have information about the disks, memory and CPUs. This will help with the cloud comparison, but we also need to get a handle on bandwidth. I don't have any experience with this so I googled "Measure Bandwidth and came up with NetWorx by SoftPerfect. I installed it on 4 of my servers on March 27, 2012.

I looked at the results from NetWorx and realized that it includes all network traffic both internal network and Internet. The NetWorx tool recommended installing WinPcap, which would enable the isolation of the Internet traffic.

Here are the results for sample date 3/29/12:

NetWorx Daily Report    
             Received -- Sent ------- Total
SRV01  12.5 MB      81.3 MB   93.8 MB 
SRV02  103 KB        316 KB     418 KB
SVR03  136 KB       45.9 KB     182 KB 
SRV04  924 KB       10.8 MB   11.7 MB 
             --------------------------------------------------
Total     13.6 MB     92.4 MB    106 MB

Using the FibreCloud  measuring technique (see link below) I'm going to convert these daily totals into estimated 5 minute peaks. I will be ultra conservative. I will divide the totals by 12hrs then by 12 for 5 minute intervals and multiply by 10 to get a high number. We will only pay for what we use, so this strategy is only to get a price from the provioder.

Daily total in MB		13.6	92.4	106.0
per day in bytes		14,260,633.6	96,888,422.4	111,149,056.0
divided by 12 - per hour		1,188,386.1	8,074,035.2	9,262,421.3
divided by 12 - per 5 minute		99,032.2	672,836.3	771,868.4
times 10 - estimated Max		990,321.8	6,728,362.7	7,718,684.4
5 min peak converted back to MB		0.9	6.4	7.4

Important Note: This is only a one day snapshot. The existing computing power should analyze for a longer period. If you are thinking about porting to the cloud, go ahead and set up NetWorx/WinPCap now, so you will have stats when you need them.

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Next Post: Putting the Existing Picture Together

Additional resources:

NetWorx        WinPCap    FibreCloud Internet-Bandwidth