Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We have a lot of statistics that we collect and some of us pay a lot of attention to this and I thought some of the most interesting numbers from the beginning of the semester may be of relevance to everyone at ITS.

• You may recall that we increased the subscription costs for landline telephone service and stopped offering long distance calling. Despite that, we have 186 students from the residence halls and another 106 from the woodframe houses who have chosen to subscribe to the service. Granted that many of these students are likely to be Reslife RAs who get the service free.
• We backup typically 650 or faculty/staff desktops and laptops everyday. Whereas this has been a very valuable service, we need to start thinking about its scalability. With the desktop and laptop disk spaces increasing constantly and the boundary between official data and personal data stored in these machines blurring quickly, we need to ask ourselves, are we prepared to invest in TSM to keep up with these demands or should we be looking at other more scalable and cheaper solutions? Should we develop methodologies and infrastructure that addresses the issue of what exactly should we be backing up?
• Faculty and Staff access their email predominantly through the POP protocol – we registered approximately 107,000 logins in one day yesterday (or 375 logins approximately every 5 minutes). However, almost 85% of the students use IMAP (WebMail). This statistic was very useful for us in prioritizing the back end change for better mail performance to student mail boxes.
• Last semester, 221 classes had a Blackboard. So far this semester it is 186 and counting. We had an interesting discussion in the last ATAC (Academic Technology Advisory Committee) about what should be our goal, if any, to promote the use of Blackboard more aggressively. I will write more about it in the next few days.
• 1848 students have registered through our Resnet Registration system. 70% of them registered within 2 hours of first connecting to the network. Others may have had problems that required an action before they could be connected. This process worked very well and we received very few complaints.
• 1640 of the registered student machines are laptops. That is almost 90% of all student computers. This presents us with an opportunity to rethink some of what we do. I hope Mike and others elaborate on this from the Public Labs/Academic Commons  viewpoint.
• 40% of the laptops are Macs. We do not have data on how many of these are Duos.
• For the first time, the number of registered Macs have overtaken the Windows machines. Class of 2010 registered 313 Macs vs 285 Windows machines. This trend is very important. One of the things that we keep talking about is the use of Citrix as a way to offer a more controlled application environment for use by students. But it is also well known that Citrix environment is not well suited to run on Macs.
• Only 639 Frosh computers were registered. That looks pretty low for a class size of 720 or so. My guess is that the rmaining students simply didn’t bother to register and are happy using wireless (which does not require a registration), though the access is restricted this way.
• We are paying a lot of attention to the support of wireless network and these numbers are confirming something that we already know – prepare to invest heavily in wireless.
• We are pushing the Electronic Portfolio logins to new highs and this has direct effects of the performance of PeopleSoft databases. The numbers are staggering. Steve Windsor, Tom Dimauro, Henk and Matt have been looking at these stats and how to optimize the performance, so hopefully they will chime in.
• Heric’s group supported about 1000 special events last year (130 during reunion commencement alone) and are looking to suppotr more this year.
• We have over 1 TB of media, most of which has been digitized by the Digitization lab.

The conclusion here is, a lot is happening and we are and should continue to capture data and prepare ourselves for the future…