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First of all, apologies if this is the wrong StackExchange site for this question - it's about Ethernet network capacities, but not specifically about servers etc.

I am designing a network for a data acquisition system that will be outputting data via TCP at just over 30 Mbps. (To ward off the obvious first comment, this is definitely mega*bits* per second.)

I recall hearing somewhere that one should aim to keep a network's normal utilisation under 10% of its capacity, but I can't find any proper research to that effect. Is the 10% figure reasonable, and if so, is it appropriate for my data acquisition system or is it a figure that is intended for e.g. corporate networks that will be more 'bursty' than my constant 30 Mbps?

Would it be better to use Gigabit Ethernet, which would be running at about 3% capacity, compared to 100baseT devices that would be running at 30% capacity?

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

In my experience, you should try to keep your most-utilised link at "less than 90%" at peak. As to what your expected differences between "typical" and "peak" are, you are better placed than I am to answer that.

I guess "normal utilisation under 10%" is for networks taht experience a drastic difference between "typical" and "peak" or is based on large collision domains (coax-based and wifi, typically), where you can expect a "perfect" utilisation of roughly 80% (after that, retransmissions are taking up a larger and larger proportion of the available bandwidth, until all you have is essentially only retransmissions).

If it is a pretty constant 30 Mbps and not sharing infrastructure with a "bursty" network, I suspect 100-BaseT should be fine, but I'd also make sure to have monitoring set up (this will eat a little bandwidth and CPU on the network elements, but it's well worth it), that way you should be able to plan an upgrade to faster network links well in advance of your needs growing to the full capacity of the network.

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+1: But 'peak' is less, sometimes a lot less than the theoretical max throughput. –  symcbean Feb 23 '11 at 11:21
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