3
Trend
mpact
Deploying high-
performance PCs as
clients and servers
Today's Pentium III-based clients and servers can place
significant amounts of information on the network.
Increasing reliance
on client/server
solutions
More and more applications are being installed on servers
rather than on desktop PCs, greatly increasing the amount of
traffic on the network. At the same time, the applications
themselves are requiring greater bandwidth. This trend will
accelerate as small offices increase their reliance on
resource-intensive applications such as distributed data
bases, e-mail supporting multimedia attachments, CAD, audio
and video transmissions, groupware and push technologies.
The avalanche of IP
traffic
The increasing dependency on the Internet and intranets as
business tools means that large files are uploaded and
downloaded frequently over the network. In fact, the
widespread popularity with the Internet and Web browser-
based applications has made IP the primary protocol on the
small-business intranet.
Dramatic rise in
backbone traffic
In the past, data traffic flow within the workplace followed
the “80/20 rule," which held that 80% of network traffic
stayed within the workgroup and only 20% was traffic to and
from the server. In a recent survey, Dataquest, a market-
research firm in San Jose, CA, found that the deployment of
applications on the server, coupled with the increasing use
of intranets and the Internet, has inverted the 80/20 rule,
with 80% of the network traffic making it to the server and
only 20% remaining local.
Architectural shifts
The trend of deploying “thin clients”
?
desktop devices
equipped with a minimum of computing power
?
places an
additional strain on network capacities. Thin clients need
to contact the server continuously, not only to download the
initial applications, but also for applets that change fonts
or create tables.
Consolidating
networks
As older technologies are phased out within an organization
and those legacy users migrate to Ethernet, the number of
people sharing Ethernet bandwidth increases.
