Potential Network Congestion when saving to Network Shares

[G8ways]

Hey guys!

Looks like most of the people here are way above my level, so I apologize if this is a relatively simple question.

So basically here is the deal: I'm an intern working in IT at a government agency.  We are implementing a program called Deep Freeze (short version: prevents any permanent changes being made to the local device).  The workaround the Department Manager wants to implement for users to actually be able to save their work in a relatively similar manner that they are used to, is to redirect folders such as "Documents" to network shares.  With every employee in theory now saving their work to a network share, network usage will obviously go up.

So the task given to me is essentially: Find out by relatively how much using this strategy will increase traffic.  As an intern, the options of what I can actually do in terms of testing are incredibly limited to non-existent.  So using one department as a test group for example isn't something I can really do.

I guess what I'm really looking for is if anyone has experience with this in their own places of work, and what the results were.  Most of the work that goes on here is typical office stuff, Microsoft word and excel docs. There are around 200 employees in the Division.

Apologies for this being so vague, if anyone has anything via their own experience, or suggestions as to how I could investigate this further, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks!

[Otanx]

The quick and dirty way depending on how many users is to go to each user, and look at the size of their local profile. If there are a lot of users then grab a good sample size, average it, and multiply by number of users. Add 10 or 20% overhead.

-Otanx

[icecream-guy]

PLEEZE...PLEEZE....PLEEZE   no .PST files on network shares,
that'll kill your network right there.

[deanwebb]

PLEEZE...PLEEZE....PLEEZE   no .PST files on network shares,
that'll kill your network right there.

What happens after you put PSTs on network shares:



If you were lucky, you were killed outright in the initial explosion.

It has been that way since 1995, one of the few constants in networking and computing technology.

As for word, excel, other documents on network shares, that's called "Dropbox", "Box", or "Sharepoint" if you purchase those polished up versions of file shares/storage options. Otherwise, if you go with the classic \\server\share format, you will want something to limit share size per user and to communicate to users the limits and how it's not appropriate to use that space to store cat videos, Linux ISOs, and other large files.