School Curbs Bandwidth Use, Supports Emergency Hurricane Communications
Chapter 16 described the unique set of problems encountered by network administrators in educational environments. This chapter will move the traffic management discussion from the theoretical to the practical by taking a look at a university production environment.
Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, La., deployed a traffic management system to control peer-to-peer (P2P) application use by students that was bogging down the network with unprecedented bandwidth consumption. More recently, the university was called upon to provide guaranteed communications to emergency responders during Hurricane Katrina. The university used an Allot Communications NetEnforcer traffic management system to address both situations.
“More Bandwidth, Please!”
When its computer-savvy students returned to school in the fall of 2001, LSU found itself subject to a huge demand for more bandwidth. The network administrator strongly suspected that the unprecedented drain on existing bandwidth came from the students using the latest in P2P applications. But that suspicion was difficult to prove.
So LSU increased its Internet access bandwidth from 24 to 45 Mbps. But the additional capacity was instantly consumed, said Terry Doub, director of the LSU network operation center. The obvious solution seemed to add still more bandwidth. That next spring LSU moved to 62 Mbps, and in July upgraded yet again—to a blazing 155 Mbps.
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