How DNA Measures Network Load

How DNA Measures Network Load to better understand the DNA® Server Consolidation Roadmap, you need a solid understanding of the key technical challenges and constraints that customers face during server consolidation.

Can our Network Handle the Load?
In a typical decentralized Domino environment, we see the company's headquarters and some remote office locations. All offices are interconnected through a Wide Area Network (WAN) to which each office has its own uplink. A schematic overview of such a typical situation is shown in the picture below:
The network uplink of each office location has its own capacity into the corporate cloud. In the existing unconsolidated situation, remote offices have their own mail server to which end users connect with their Notes client.

While other network monitoring solutions can identify and measure traffic patterns for all TCPIP ports, they do this only on the network switches inside the corporate WAN and on the switches of the network uplinks. Actual patterns for end user traffic, on the other hand, remain on the Local Area Network (LAN), as most users connect to their local home server inside the remote office.

Traffic that flows over the WAN consists of server-to-server traffic, such as mail routing and server replication traffic. In the existing decentralized situation, end-user traffic hardly flows over the network uplinks, because users mostly work on their local (in office) mail and application servers.

Therefore, customers cannot use the information from network monitoring solutions to evaluate actual network needs (post-consolidation) and make predictions for future network demand.


Instead, we need to measure the existing demand patterns that result from users generating Notes traffic on the LAN and between Domino servers in each office location. It is this local end-user traffic that will need to fit into the uplinks and WAN capacity, after we consolidate the servers away to corporate headquarters or the central data center location.











DNA® Network Analysis examines these end user traffic patterns and separates end user traffic from server traffic. Internally developed algorithms translate the observed traffic patterns into network bandwidth consumption levels, allowing Trust Factory to calculate both common and uncommon consolidation scenarios, with unprecedented accuracy.

After the servers have been moved to a consolidated data center, the server-to-server traffic over the WAN no longer exists, because the servers have been removed from the remote locations. What remains is the end-user traffic, which now flows over the uplinks, into the corporate WAN, and into the data center. 

DNA® produces a server consolidation overview that reveals the network capacity consequences of changes at each remote office and corresponding uplink. By comparing the network bandwidth consumption of Notes users for each office location to the available capacity for TCPIP port 1352 in that office, the overview shows exactly which locations can consolidate. For those locations where the existing capacity is not sufficient, DNA® reveals how much additional capacity is required.