Contributors to bandwidth requirements

NFM-P GUI clients

The bandwidth specifications provided above for NFM-P GUI clients are based on the fact that information about changes in the network is forwarded to the NFM-P GUI clients. The NFM-P client updates the information visible to the user based on recent changes in the network.

A few examples of network changes which will be reported to the NFM-P include status changes of physical equipment, status changes of Layer 2 or Layer 3 interfaces, configuration of network elements, provisioning of new equipment or services, status changes in services or any attributes thereof, and configuration changes of routing protocols.

In situations where the frequency of changes sent to the NFM-P GUI is significant and exceeds the bandwidth specification, the performance of the NFM-P client will degrade, and there is a possibility that the connection to the server will be dropped. An NFM-P GUI restart will be required to reconnect to the server to receive change notifications.

NFM-P GUI clients on X displays

NFM-P GUI clients can be displayed remotely on terminals using the X11 protocol for graphical displays. In these cases, it is important to ensure that the bandwidth availability between the station running the NFM-P client and the host displaying the NFM-P client is at least 1024 Kbps. Also, it is important to ensure that the round-trip network latency between these two hosts is quite low (20-30 ms). To achieve acceptable performance on bandwidth limited links, X-compression should be used, by using the ssh -XC command. If compression is not used, it is recommended that the minimum bandwidth is higher than 1024 Kbps. Situations where the available bandwidth is lower or the network latency is higher will result in the poor usability of the NFM-P GUI client. A bandwidth of 1024 Kbps will impact the GUI start time and will not meet the published time of less than 2 minutes.

Additional bandwidth may be required to support the network elements described in Network element specific requirements

Note that the NFM-P GUI client startup may be impacted when using minimum bandwidth links.

XML API clients

The two main factors affecting the bandwidth requirements between the NFM-P server and an XML API client are the following:

Applications which listen to network changes via the JMS interface provided by the NFM-P XML API or applications which retrieve large pieces of information via the API, such as statistics information or network inventory information, require access to a dedicated bandwidth from the machine hosting the application to the NFM-P server according to the tables provided above. Applications which do not require real-time event and alarm notifications may operate with acceptable performance when the bandwidth between the machine hosting the application and the NFM-P server is less than the quantity specified in the tables above.

It is a best practice to minimize event and alarm notifications using a JMS filter to reduce bandwidth requirements and the possible effects of network latency.

In an environment where network changes are infrequent, it is possible to successfully operate an application using the API when the bandwidth between the machine hosting this application and the NFM-P server is less than the quantity specified in the tables above, possibly as little as 128 Kbps. However, in situations where the frequency of network changes increases, the performance or responsiveness of the application will degrade.

NFM-P auxiliary statistics collector

The main factors impacting communication to and from the NFM-P auxiliary statistics collector are the following:

The more performance statistics are collected, the more significant the bandwidth utilization between the NFM-P server and the NFM-P auxiliary statistics collector. Similarly, this requires more significant bandwidth utilization between the NFM-P auxiliary statistics collector and the NFM-P database stations. The bandwidth requirements are not dependent on the network activity.