My company has a point-to-point T1 connection to one of our remote offices. The line is always near 80 percent to 90 percent saturation. I've limited network broadcast traffic through our Cisco 2651 Router and Cisco 4006 Switch configurations and shut down FTP access between the sites. The bulk of the traffic results from file transfers and email. Both locations have a Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server; the servers are part of the same Exchange organization. Do you have any suggestions for reducing traffic?

First, I recommend you configure your Exchange 2000 servers to limit the email attachment size that users can send between servers. To limit file transfers, you can replicate some of the commonly accessed directories between the two sites; schedule replication to occur during low-traffic hours. You can also use the Cisco 2651 Router to compress the traffic. The Cisco 2600 Series routers have an Advanced Integration Module (AIM) slot that supports a compression module. Although Cisco claims the Data Compression AIM can achieve compression ratios of as much as 4:1 using the (STAC) LZS compression algorithm, 2:1 is more common. The Data Compression AIM also supports the Microsoft Point-to-Point Compression (MPCC) algorithm.

Learn more about this module and data compression on the Cisco platform at http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/rt/2600/prodlit/dcaim_ds.htm.