Best Practices Infrastructure and IT

Traffic Separation and VLANs Pros: 1.Ease of management and troubleshooting 2.Security 3.Performance benefit. 4.If the department already has layer 3 switches, there is minimal cost involved. Why separate Traffic? Cons 1.Requires knowledge and support for additional switches or VLAN’ing. 2.Additional cost for switches, or Layer 3 switches 3.Layer 3 overhead 4.May not help your aggregate bandwidth without switch stacking or etherchannel.

Video System Bandwidth How much bandwidth do I need? You will never have enough bandwidth, so the best approach is to utilize what is existing to offer the best user experience.

Video System Bandwidth People do not like waiting. End-users complain when they have to wait. The main there are 2 major items for the video system that will prompt dissatisfaction from the user. 1.System responsiveness – Is it snappy? 2.Video Review – People do not like to wait when wanting to review video. Especially when reviewing 3.Video Upload – People do not like to wait for uploading, especially at the end of a 12 hour shift.

Video System Bandwidth Burst Bandwidth is all that matters. There are very short timeframes where the video system utilizes large amounts of bandwidth. You can manage expectations by controlling these times. 1.Video upload during shift change. 10 simultaneous uploads on a n network can saturate a 1Gbps NIC, which drastically affects overall performance of the network for the duration. 2.Bulk video transfer during Multi-Server or DR transfer. Manage time frames, QOS, Etherchannel, or network separation to fight these.

Multi-Server (Store-and-Forward)

Integration Possibilities: 1.SQL based – queries, crystal reports, pivot tables 2.Can be automated to import users from a HR resource, vehicles from a Motorpool resource, etc. 3.Windows environment – use of environmental variables like user (single sign-on) COBAN uses several industry standards.

The test environment 1.Provides a way to test drive new features without committing an entire fleet. 2.Educates the testers, administrators, testers PRIOR to having to deal with it in production. 3.Validates that changes have minimal impact to the production environment. 4.Provides a venue for suggestions and what-ifs. Having a test environment is great ROI.

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