Internet Usage at an All Time High!

By Wayne Gallant, Director Network Services, OIT

The current 95% utilization rates of the Internet are creeping up to the point where supporting that amount of sustained traffic is resulting in unacceptable response times for customers using the State of Maine IT infrastructure.

Our current Internet access consists of a primary 50 megabit circuit to USM with a secondary 38mb asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) circuit to UMO. The connections are configured to failover in the event of an outage. This results in most of the state's traffic passing through the 50mb USM connection. Along with Internet traffic the State of Maine (SOM) enterprise firewall supports a gigabit link to a neutral zone (demilitarized zone - DMZ) where publicly accessible servers are located. Inbound traffic passing through the firewall goes through a 100mb connected Intrusion Protection System (IPS) before reaching the internal network.

Neither link, on its own, is capable of supporting that amount of sustained traffic with acceptable response time. The Monday October 15 th graph below shows the USM link saturated between approximately 9:00 and 2:00 .

In addition to the Internet traffic we are currently seeing 40mb to 50mb going between the internal SOM network and the DMZ. Add in the Internet traffic and that pushes the utilization on the 100mb IPS link into the 90% plus range.

Monday October 15th

Bandwith Usage

Wednesday October 17th

Bandwith Usage

Friday October 19th

Bandwith Usage

Employee – State employees are reporting difficulties processing financial, purchasing, Treasury transfers, and MRS transfers over the Internet due to timeouts.

Public – With the current utilization, BMV mobile units are unable to connect to the wide area network (WAN) via broadband connections and have to turn citizens away that are trying to renew licenses and registrations.

What you can do:

While you're at work, please use the Internet judiciously. Maine State Government has a finite amount of network bandwidth available to us. When there is a high volume of network traffic, things slow down for everyone.

Through monitoring the use of bandwidth, it appears that the largest consumers of the network are non-business uses such as “aol.stream”. In order to provide enough capacity of this expensive service for state government business, OIT will be tracking network traffic and identifying its top ten “talkers” in an effort to understand our capacity needs. Access to some of these sites may be blocked unless a business use is identified. Blocking just one of the high throughput talkers, last week, resulted in recovery of 10% of our network capacity. At this point two sites are now blocked – Streamtheworld and aol.stream.

Article posted on: November 15, 2007
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