Network Applications

Georgia Tech has offered a centralized video streaming service for over a decade. Initially supported as a traditional shared hosting service with users maintaining their own directories of content, the dramatic growth in volume in recent years has required a different approach. We are currently developing Open Media Services, an open source web service, which will provide multimedia storage, management, conversion, and streaming to various systems on campus (course management, classroom capture, iTunesU, podcasting, institution repositories, and more). The session will cover goals, strategies, and lessons learned related to this project and streaming media architectures in general.

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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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.

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information. Information technology combines the principles of visualization with powerful applications and large data sets to create sophisticated images and animations. Representing large amounts of disparate information in a visual form often allows you to see patterns that would otherwise be buried in vast, unconnected data sets. Data visualizations offer one way to harness infrastructure to find hidden trends and correlations that can lead to important discoveries. Visual literacy is an increasingly important skill, and data visualizations are another channel for students to develop their ability to process information visually.

SOA can provide a secure, reliable, and agile architecture that benefits the entire institution.

"How much longer can colleges and universities continue to rely on packet-shaping as the fundamental way of dealing with bandwidth-intensive applications? From a purely technical point of view, the answer is, of course: Indefinitely...."

For years, Oregon State University (OSU) had managed Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) tables with a set of command-line scripts developed by the campus network engineering group. The scripts worked well but required a certain level of understanding to use them. In 2000, a decision was made to change the institutional domain name from orst.edu to oregonstate.edu. With this significant operational change, it was determined that the DNS/DHCP table management tool in place at the time was not sufficiently scalable to support necessary retrofit requirements, and the decision was made to replace it with an in-house developed Web-based application.

Virtual applications present great challenges but even greater benefits. Fontys University in The Netherlands uses virtual applications to enhance student, teacher, and staff experience; dramatically speed up release management; build a modular infrastructure; enable institutional goals; and realize considerable budget savings.

Our existing educational system was created to serve in an era when knowledge was fairly static. Today's complex environments and rapid knowledge growth require an educational model that is adaptive to global trends and new learning contexts. Our existing structures of learning need to be redesigned to account for foundational shifts in business, government, society, and technology.

Presentation at the December 2005 ECAR Symposium in Carefree, Arizona. Ubiquitous computing and communications technology are changing the social and educational worlds of students. The talk parses the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project about the ways that students and faculty use the Internet, how cell phones and wireless connections have changed interactions among students and their teachers, and how the changed media ecology of today's students affects the way they learn and form social ties.