HP dc73 HP Blade Workstation Solution Planning Guide - Page 35

5-6 Network summary Networks, network equipment, and usage models are so varied that a one-size-fits-all approach to implementing a network solution is insufficient. Each blade workstation installation must be individually sized based on the actual environment in which it will be used. The following guidelines can help you achieve a successful deployment: 1. Determine your organizational priorities regarding RGS interactivity, security, and reliability. Based on these priorities, incorporate appropriate features from the network designs presented in this chapter. 2. Survey the network topology that will connect the blade workstation to the client computers • Determine link speeds, and switch and router capacity. • Determine the available bandwidth between client and blade. The slowest link should be running at 10 Mb/s full-duplex, and should be at the network edge. • Using equipment specifications and collected bandwidth data, determine the number of edge devices that can be supported on the network. • Do not exceed 60% of the available network bandwidth on any link between the edge devices and the blade workstations. At a minimum, use the average bandwidth required by RGS plus two standard deviations based on measured data. 3. Install a blade workstation (or small number of blade workstations), and collect network performance statistics. The following statistics should be collected in a setting as close as possible to the production environment: • Current network utilization • Client-to-blade latency-This should be less than 20 ms for a 2 KB packet size for highly interactive applications (many applications will tolerate latencies as high as 80 ms or more) • Network bandwidth consumed by RGS running production workloads • The percentage of lost packets, which should be less than 10% for interactive performance Network Planning 35