Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Infrastructure for an Online Delivery System

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Thursday, 21 July 2005
This presentation is part of G-5: High Availability and Disaster Recovery Management
Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Infrastructure for an Online Delivery System

Description: As institutions ramp up online learning, reliance on the IT infrastructure grows proportional to the introduction of totally online degree programs and supporting course materials. If critical data and online applications are not replicated and failed-over quickly and transparently to the users, the impact can have devastating consequences. Implementing fault tolerance enables a critical system to respond gracefully to an unexpected hardware or software failure. Learn how one campus addressed the issue of high availability.
Presentation Format: Showcase
Topic: Integrating the campus: Technical solutions and extended uses
Target Audience: Academic Technology Directors, E-learning Managers, Senior Administrators, System Administrators
Appropriate Audience Level: Beginning or new users of WebCT, Experienced WebCT users
WebCT Version:
Abstract Text: Online educational opportunities are becoming increasingly abundant as institutions invest heavily in Web-based delivery systems to promote lifelong learning opportunities and sharpen their competitive edge. And the efforts have paid off. Higher education institutions, such as Minot State University (FTE 3,500), are overcoming obstacles including diminishing enrollments and unfavorable demographic forecasts, and are benefiting from newly generated online revenues. When exclusively bricks and mortar, a reliable campus IT infrastructure is important to ensure delivery of email and other Web-based services but can handle occasional system down times, especially if financial and student administrative systems are outsourced. This was the case for MiSU prior to 1997. However, the complexity of the campus IT infrastructure increased with the implementation and ongoing expansion of our online degree programs. Business continuity, user satisfaction, and system reliability became mission critical objectives that cannot be sustained with numerous disruptions in service and extended down times. Increasingly, it became evident that using a traditional tape backup system was an acceptable solution for archival purposes, but does not address the need for a disaster recovery solution to deal with the escalating restore times required in the event of a significant system failure. Overall, our goals in adopting a commercially supported failover system that offers more stability, reliability and support services is to (1) achieve the necessary level of system reliability, (2) ensure maximum protection of mission critical data, and (3) significantly reduce how software or system failures impact users.

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Description:	As institutions ramp up online learning, reliance on the IT infrastructure grows proportional to the introduction of totally online degree programs and supporting course materials. If critical data and online applications are not replicated and failed-over quickly and transparently to the users, the impact can have devastating consequences. Implementing fault tolerance enables a critical system to respond gracefully to an unexpected hardware or software failure. Learn how one campus addressed the issue of high availability.
Presentation Format:	Showcase
Topic:	Integrating the campus: Technical solutions and extended uses
Target Audience:	Academic Technology Directors, E-learning Managers, Senior Administrators, System Administrators
Appropriate Audience Level:	Beginning or new users of WebCT, Experienced WebCT users
WebCT Version:
Abstract Text:	Online educational opportunities are becoming increasingly abundant as institutions invest heavily in Web-based delivery systems to promote lifelong learning opportunities and sharpen their competitive edge. And the efforts have paid off. Higher education institutions, such as Minot State University (FTE 3,500), are overcoming obstacles including diminishing enrollments and unfavorable demographic forecasts, and are benefiting from newly generated online revenues. When exclusively bricks and mortar, a reliable campus IT infrastructure is important to ensure delivery of email and other Web-based services but can handle occasional system down times, especially if financial and student administrative systems are outsourced. This was the case for MiSU prior to 1997. However, the complexity of the campus IT infrastructure increased with the implementation and ongoing expansion of our online degree programs. Business continuity, user satisfaction, and system reliability became mission critical objectives that cannot be sustained with numerous disruptions in service and extended down times. Increasingly, it became evident that using a traditional tape backup system was an acceptable solution for archival purposes, but does not address the need for a disaster recovery solution to deal with the escalating restore times required in the event of a significant system failure. Overall, our goals in adopting a commercially supported failover system that offers more stability, reliability and support services is to (1) achieve the necessary level of system reliability, (2) ensure maximum protection of mission critical data, and (3) significantly reduce how software or system failures impact users.