10 to Auto/Auto or 100 Full on Cisco swich cost advantage

Let me first start by saying that I don't know all the technical terminoligy when it comes to Fast Ethernet.

I work for a large company that to date has stuck with the standard for remote sites to leave the switch ports set @ 10 mbps on client connections. However, we are fully wired with Cat 5 cabling throughout the building and have had our server updated to run at 100 Full and have found that we could get the entire building updated to

100 on all clients...

The only issue is that change does not happen easily for us and usually we have to justify some type of change with a cost impact or analysis that will show a cost savings.

We all know the differences that 10 vs 100 will make to all clients when it comes to network resources, but saying that is never enough.

Can anyone direct me to any tools, spreadsheets, etc that I could use to calculate some numbers that could be handed off to managment that would help to estimate the average cost savings per user.

Thanks...

Reply to
kellysc
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I think the biggest "loss" is productivity from the missing speed that could be there and that you may need to come up with some fudge numbers for what a typical task might take if their lan connection is 10Mb vs.

100Mb and quantify the gap between them and assign a $/hr figure to it and then multiply that by the number of people impacted to get an overall cost figure.. I believe that's done all the time by analysts when trying to compute these sorts of fuzzy numbers. We do that sort of thing all the time for Six Sigma activities (don't get me started on that though!)
Reply to
Rick F.

I think that idea will do just fine for what I need to get this started.

Thanks!

Reply to
kellysc

You made one statement that needs to be addressed. You said remote site. A question to consider is where your resources such as email and file services reside? If all or some of your resources are remote over a WAN connection such as a T1, your numbers will need to be adjusted for WAN and or local LAN.

Reply to
cghoerichs

I don't think that's the only statement that needs addressing. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find universal agreement with:

If the majority of your traffic is between these 10Mb/s clients, then an upgrade to 100Mb/s interfaces will certainly make a difference.

But that's not how the traffic at remote sites of large companies which stick with "standard" configurations usually looks.

The majority of traffic at these sites is usually between the clients and boxes like the one you described as "our server". ...Or between the clients and some systems on the other end of the remote site's WAN link.

Are you sure the client NICs are your bottleneck?

/chris

Reply to
chris

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