Network Planning

Capacity planning or capacity management isn't just for networks anymore. In fact, while enterprise wide area networks (WANs) were once only optimized for transaction processing, it is now harder to find an enterprise WAN that hasn't been optimized in multiple ways to carry voice and video, Internet, and some mission-critical application that replaced a mainframe transaction system. With all of the new and interesting traffic types floating around in the WAN, it's a wonder anyone can keep things straight. Even Internet backbones, which should be application agnostic, are throttling certain applications to protect their own infrastructures. WAN capacity planning must evolve from an effort that network architects undertook alone into an effort that involves coordination among multiple infrastructure groups inside IT.

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EDUCAUSE recently convened a summit of university CIOs to obtain their insights on generating a set of national cyberinfrastructure priorities and to determine strategies and tactics for EDUCAUSE and its members. Learn about the projects EDUCAUSE initiated based on this meeting, and how your institution can become more involved in these efforts.

Designing and implementing a network, server, and application architecture for 24 x 7 Web application delivery is a must in today's demanding business environment. This presentation will cover the planning, complexities to address, and necessary steps to achieve reliable delivery of campus-wide financial, human resources, and student applications.

Students and faculty at all educational levels want anywhere, anytime access to a leading-edge, resource-rich computing, learning, and research environment—and CIOs and IT professionals want this visionary environment to be affordable, scalable, usable, and supportable. Responding to these competing needs and constraints, North Carolina State University has developed and implemented a next-generation computing strategy and architecture for the universal delivery of computing services. This environment is now in campus-wide production status. The architecture is highly uniform, extensible, scalable, malleable, sustainable, and supportable. Collectively, these characteristics combine to produce an innovative advancement with the potential to radically transform the access, functionality, and economic benchmarks for the current university computing paradigm.