Evaluating Backup Bandwidth with a Portable Wan Emulator

I’ve been using WAN emulators for well over 20 years and tried all sorts of Windows, Linux, and appliances. Personally, I prefer an appliance instead of trying to build my own since I don’t have time to deal with maintaining another computer, figuring out which update messed things up, and wondering how accurate it really is.Got a call from a client who wanted to locate a backup server offsite and was trying to figure out how much bandwidth the application requires. He was told by the vendor that a 100 Mb link will be fine. After calling several carriers, he found out that some can’t provide a 100 Mb link at the recovery location, and the ones that can provide a 100Mb link want an absurd amount of money.I spoke to the client about the backup server and how it interacts with the master server and what traffic would be expected. I explained the best approach would be for me to spend some time emulating various bandwidth scenarios between the servers.  The goal would be to determine the bandwidth requirements. Fortunately, I knew other clients who use various carriers in the proposed area and gathered some latency, packet loss, and bandwidth values.  I chose to use 800 Byte packet pings since the servers use that average packet size.