Managing Bandwidth

[lreger]

My employer is starting to host customer servers at our office. What would be the right device that we would need to purchase to manage how much bandwidth each customers network gets? ex: restricting a specific network to only get 1.5mb instead of using all the pipe.?

Thanks

[Joseph W. Doherty]

At the most basic, a device that support traffic policing would be minimal. Next step up would be a device that also supports traffic shaping (which would be a "nicer" method to limit a customer's bandwidth). (Many of Cisco advanced switches support some kind of policing. Most of Cisco's routers support both policing and shaping.)

BTW: Unless you control both ends of a link, shaping can't be used for inbound, and policing inbound doesn't fully control inbound link utilization.

[lreger]

Thanks for the info, I am looking into the Cisco 3800 series router or the Cisco 3560 switch.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

3560 is a nice L3 switch.

Any of the ISR routers, generally, offer about the same features. Biggest difference is performance, so depending on you bandwidth needs, don't overlook the 2800 series either.