Network planning

Consider firewalls, proxies, VPNs, DMZs, reverse proxies, load balancers and more when planning network requirements. You need to understand the data path and the technical hurdles in your data path. Most of all, you need to bring your network team to the table to begin discussing Sametime® network bandwidth requirements and the ports that need to be open in firewalls, both internal and external firewalls.

You need to also consider network problem spots. These are edge cases that can make a person's experience of Sametime less than ideal. Does everyone have enough bandwidth to support audio and video? Do you have people still on DSL?

Before you start installing a Media Manager to bring audio and video to your enterprise, sit down with your network team to discuss bandwidth requirements for Sametime and current enterprise bandwidth capacity.

Are there firewalls? Some companies are now using internal firewalls. Will users be required to traverse a proxy? This can be a challenge because networking technology has evolved to make reverse proxies transparent so these proxies are not always apparent. Sometimes, you don't know out about reverse proxies because some rewrite the packets. When the network is analyzed, you find out that the data path is actually going through a transparent HTTP proxy. Firewalls, proxies, web accelerators, offload SSL... most of these may be transparent to you. But when you go to deploy a new technology, the result can be roadblocks.

Are you planning an extranet deployment? You will need to sit down with your network team to discuss the ports that need to be open in the internal firewall and in the external firewall to the DMZ.

Is peer-to-peer networking traffic allowed? File sharing and audio and video through the Sametime Connect client uses peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer networking is a huge local variable for network teams. Sametime will default to peer-to-peer for one-to-one chat. Do you want to lock everyone into a centralized Media Manager or use peer-to-peer?

How many people have Voice over IP? If you engage the network team, you can integrate audio and video with their Quality of Service (QoS) scheme.

Is your network ready for mobile? What about VPN or mobile users? Will your Sametime servers have to traverse firewalls and proxies? Are load balancers in use? How can you get status checks on your backend servers such as LDAP and DB2®? Will peer-to-peer traffic for audio and video be allowed for mobile users? How will your deployment coexist or integrate with existing VoIP services?