PacketLogic for Higher-Education Institutions

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. 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.

There is a new requirement that is developing to manage individual users rather than just bandwidth in higher education networks. This requires integration with the AAA or NAC system used by universities to enable role-based access, usage quotas, better forensics and threat management, as well as network audit capbilities.

PacketLogic Smart Campus – A Turnkey Traffic Management Solution for Higher-Education Institutions

PacketLogic Smart Campus includes traffic classification, traffic management, statistics analytics and end-user provisioning – features that combined provide full visibility and control over campus networks. PacketLogic Smart Campus is priced and licensed to accommodate the specific conditions of Higher Education customers. This attractive suite combines Procera's inline PacketLogic devices PL8820, PL8720 and PL7720 combined with the PL1200 statistics server and the educational edition, PSM-E, of PacketLogic Subscriber Manager.

Learn More: PacketLogic Smart Campus , PacketLogic Smart Campus (A4)

Achieve HEOA and DMCA Compliance with PacketLogic Traffic Shaping Solutions

Most Higher Education institutions are intimately familiar with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) , with many having received DMCA notices, a piece of legislation titled the Higher Education Opportunities Act of 2008, or HEOA, has recently come to the light as a new requirement that lays out very specific guidelines for combating the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials. As defined in an update to the HEOA, starting on July 1st, 2010, colleges and universities are required to develop and implement a plan in writing to combat illegal P2P file sharing. PacketLogic Smart Campus is the most effective way to combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials.

Learn More: HEOA Solutions , HEOA Solutions (A4)

PacketLogic solutions provide deep packet inspection (DPI) 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.

Higher Education Use Cases:

Network Analytics: Detailed analytics on network consumption based on users, applications, devices, location, and other metrics used to conduct capacity planning and network spending.
Usage Management: Management of networks based on volume of traffic consumed by students and faculty on the network (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc,). Could include multiple levels of services.
Traffic Management: Service Management and prioritization of content and applications based on university priorities (Distance learning and telemedicine prioritized over file sharing).
Peering Management: Policies and traffic management based in BGP peering information – Quality of Experience, congestion, traffic prioritization, and application management.
Traffic Auditing: HEOE compliance through auditing and management of P2P file sharing
Traffic Steering: User and application-aware steering of traffic to value-added services (security, content filtering, caching, etc) and 3rd party content/service providers.
Threat Management: Integration with threat management systems for granular data feeds, DDOS attack mitigation, and audit purposes.
Captive Portals and Emergency Notifications: Re-direction of web browsing to a web service for authentication and emergency notifications.
Congestion Management and Fair Use: Quality of Experience management to ensure high quality delivery of Internet service even in times of congestion on the access or core network.

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