Interface

“Hardware is the preferred choice”

S Narayanan, CMD, MRO-TEK, talks about the increasing need for optimal bandwidth management in organisations

How aware are Indian enterprises about bandwidth management issues?

Companies are definitely realising that they need to better manage their bandwidth. However, it will take a minimum of one or two years for most organisations to fully understand the problem.

So how can bandwidth issues be managed?

An appropriate policy is the solution to this problem which keeps all the users satisfied with the bandwidth they are using, and which gets the minimum complaints.

Which kind of solution is recommended for bandwidth management—hardware or software?

Hardware is the preferred choice. It takes care of latency and delay issues as there is no need to change the whole network. In a hardware solution one saves on band-width by creating channels, which is not possible in a software solution. Also, with a hardware solution, TCP flow is better since it comes in a package.

Bandwidth surveillance applications help in maximising the use of bandwidth as they allocate a particular bandwidth to a particular application/user, so even if a particular application/user is choking up bandwidth, it will still be restricted only to the bandwidth allocated to it/the user and will not affect other applications/users.

—Sneha Khanna