Bandwidth Management

Overview

Why Manage Your Bandwidth?

Your network is used for email, applications, web site access and any other form of corporate communication. All of these tools utilize and require a percentage of your overall bandwidth. If these tasks do not have sufficient bandwidth, they will begin to feel slow and unresponsive.

FileCatalyst is capable of maximizing usage of your allocated bandwidth. For example, if your organization has a T3 line, FileCatalyst is able to transfer at 45Mbps. However, this may not be practical during peak periods of the day when FileCatalyst may need to share available bandwidth with other applications.

Users themselves may manage and schedule their bandwidth usage by using the Bandwidth scheduler (see below). The user may even specify periods during which there should be no transfer activity by choosing "No Transfers" for the selected time.

Selecting an Appropriate Rate

The bandwidth scheduler allows users to limit or cap the level of bandwidth usage for a period of time. Example: if you have a T1 connection, you may wish to allocate 500 kbps of data transfer during the day and leave the remaining 1044 kbps for office use. However, at 6:00 PM you may wish to fully allocate 95% or 1467 kbps of bandwidth for data transfer. It is up to the users and the FileCatalyst administrator(s) to create an appropriate schedule.

NOTE: Congestion Control also automates the FileCatalyst transfer rate as networks become congested. As additional network traffic comes on-line and creates congestion, FileCatalyst will slow down or throttle back the transfer rate. It will remain in this state until the network is no longer congested. At which point the transfer will speed up until it resumes its set rate. This is a selectable feature which is enabled by editing individual tasks.