The software leverages the college's existing Check Point FireWall-1 product, in fact, sparing the IT staff the trouble of integrating an appliance with the rest of the network infrastructure, learning a new management architecture and GUI, or anything similar. Spitzer and company bought a license and were cleared for takeoff. With FireWall-1 at the network edge, they already had the platform at the precise location where they planned to apply traffic prioritization. The backbone between consolidation points is Gigabit Ethernet, with Fast Ethernet just about everywhere else. The college mainly uses centralized servers, with a server farm at the core switch.
Departmental servers exist in areas where it is logical to put the server closer to users.
Network performance on campus has never been affected, says Spitzer. Even at the worst of the network congestion, the campus network operated without problems. One of the times I was getting complaints from my boss, who's in a different building, I set up his machine to Ping across campus through three switches and to a Novell server and back, ran it for day, and never had a Ping of over 100 milliseconds. Parting Thoughts Ultimately, Spitzer believes that FloodGate-1 saved the college from going out and throwing loads of money at bandwidth, which he doesn't think would have solved the problem anyway. I don't know that there's such a thing as throwing enough bandwidth at it to get away with not managing it.