Zipline as a product is designed to be very easy on bandwidth. However, communication teams often use Zipline to deliver large files, photos, and videos to the stores. This type of information makes up the vast majority of downloaded bandwidth from our servers.
The following graph represents data passing through our Content Delivery Network (CDN) on a per-store basis across all of our customers in Megabytes. All requests to Zipline, including POST requests, go through this CDN. The intent of the graph is to show the range of daily bandwidth being downloaded.
This graph includes all users, including HQ and Upperfield Users. However, as they make up a very small relative portion, it doesn’t skew the numbers in any meaningful way.
Sept 23, Sept 30, Oct 7, and Oct 14 are Sundays. That’s generally the lowest day of Zipline usage and it’s clearly reflected in this graph. Mondays and Tuesdays are when a lot of the planning takes place, so we see a dramatic increase in usage as well as file downloading.
As these are averages, you’re clearly going to have spikes that are higher. As such, we recommend modeling out your networks with a 2X multiplier on these numbers.
Also, if your organization is planning on delivering streaming video, you’ll want to model based on sustained download per second instead of overall bandwidth costs. For streaming video, we recommend a minimum of 0.25 Megabytes per second.
Formula for bandwidth estimates:
Usage in Megabytes = (B * 2) * D * S
B = Bandwidth
D = Days in a month (30.42)
S = Number of Stores
Thus, a 100 store retailer would be using 13.47 * 2 * 30.42 * 100 = 81,951.48 Megabytes, or 82 Gigabytes of bandwidth a year on Zipline.
This usage can also be impacted by things such as burst rates and Quality of Service (QOS) that your network team will be more familiar with.
