Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
North Carolina State University: Network Agents Plot the Path of Least Resistance
11/26/2002
NCSU benefits from Commander Solutions' "inside-out/outside-in" perspective of its Web services. The software combines data on the entire Web services infrastructure with data collected from tests of simulated user transactions to better track the end user's true online experience and more quickly diagnose problems. "The quizzing service may be composed of PERL scripts connecting to Sybase … Commander Solutions tests the page and looks not only at the server, but also evaluates how the service as a whole is behaving," explains Nicholos.
If problems do occur, the diagnostic software works hand-in-hand with the traffic manager to route traffic around the problem so that NCSU's students and faculty are not affected by performance deterioration. During that time, Resonate Commander Solutions work to further diagnose the problem, fix it and alert an administrator that a problem has occurred.
NCSU is now delivering more services on the same number of servers than a "bigger-faster" strategy would require. The school's infrastructure supports more than 40 Web services and 5.5 million hits a day to its Web sites. Eight of the 16 servers used by NCSU have gone beyond their 3-year lifecycle and continue to offer Web pages at their optimal performance.
For more information, contact Harry Nicholas, NCSU assistant director for Unix and Web services at harry_nicholos@ncsu.edu.
Recommended Reading
- Beck Technology Donates DProfiler to Colleges, Universities
Beck Technology recently announced that it will donate its DProfiler software platform to colleges and universities for use in construction-related coursework.
- Microsoft Adds Gen 4 Datacenters for Cloud Computing
Microsoft is initiating the fourth in a series of datacenter upgrades to enable its cloud computing services, according to a Microsoft blog post Tuesday. And, like everything else in the software world, being highly modular is a good thing.
- Can You Operate as a Virtual Being?
Now that we are conducting at least a part of our business of education virtually and often meeting in virtual environments, let's explore the really big question for academics in a Web 2.0 era...
- Columbia Center To Smooth Web Operations with Collaboration Suite
A college or university without a Web site is inconceivable today, but with every site comes the challenge of managing content. Some sort of automated system is a given, but how much should the site's content management system integrate with other aspects of the campus computing infrastructure?
- IBM's Pass It Along: Mapping Memes Toward A Learning Organization
How IBM's new release is following through on old challenges... big ones.
- North Idaho College To Provide Accessible Lecture Recordings for Disabled Students
North Idaho College will be implementing a new classroom capture system as part of an effort to provide accessible education to students with disabilities. The college will be using SpeakerBox from ClearSky Systems for the lecture capture program beginning in January 2009.
