Educational Institution Challenges

IT managers for universities, colleges and other educational institutions operate complex networks designed to serve diverse user groups – students, faculty, staff, and often the surrounding community. These managers need awareness of how their network is being utilized, analysis on what bandwidth is really needed to deliver quality services to their students and faculty, and control over the usage of their valuable network resources. These network resources typically support multiple applications and uses, from academic research to campus VoIP, mission-critical business applications and grid computing, for example. The proliferation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing, streaming video, multi-player gaming and other bandwidth-intensive applications has heavily impacted most higher-education organizations – for example, P2P often exceeds 70% of total network traffic for these networks.

Educational Institution Requirements

Higher-education IT managers face multiple, often conflicting network requirements, among them maintaining a high quality of service (QoS) for research and business-critical applications (which are often revenue generating like distance learning and telemedicine) while keeping costs down. Visibility and control into the usage on peering links is vital, as this is a key cost factor for education, and the ability to set policies based on peering links is critical to cost control. Educational institutions are often the test bed for new applications and games, pushing the requirements for rapid signature development to the limit. International applications are also a challenge, and visibility into foreign language applications is also a key requirement. IT managers are also implementing fair usage policies on their networks, so per-user visibility and integration with their authentication system is an operational necessity.

PacketLogic Solutions for Higher-Education Institutions

PacketLogic solutions provide deep packet inspection capabilities that allow highly accurate identification of network traffic such as BitTorrent, YouTube, Skype and others – even if these applications use port-hopping, encryption, masking or other behaviors to hide their identity. PacketLogic Intelligence Center provides precise visibility into network traffic, allowing accurate traffic management and optimization of bandwidth. Policy-based management and traffic shaping allows allocation of bandwidth by application (such as VoIP), department, time-of-day, volume, or per user through the use of the PacketLogic Subscriber Management system. PacketLogic Real-Time Enforcement systems also allow easy bandwidth growth in the network through software licensing and through multiple system deployments using Procera’s innovative clustering technology.

Read more about PacketLogic in higher-education institutions in our case studies and white papers at right.

Key PacketLogic Features for Higher-Education Institutions:

• Deploy fairness to secure expected resources to all users
• Accurate and reliable intelligence on what your users do online - available in real-time
• Optimize the utilization of expensive network resources and Internet capacity through visibility into Internet routing
• Non-disruptive queue-based shaping and prioritization technology that secures quality for sensitive applications
• Seamless and easy installation that requires no network modifications
• Carrier-grade performance and capacity at enterprise pricing