EdTech Magazine: Higher Ed

Who Are The Best Shooters In The NBA?

Wylie Wong — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:01:55 +0000

Ever wonder who the best shooters are in the NBA? Kirk Goldsberry did — and he found out the answer by analyzing every shot taken by an NBA player over the past five years.

Goldsberry, a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Geographic Analysis, typically conducts research in the field of geographic information science. But during the past year, he applied his expert knowledge of geography to the basketball court.

“My main goal was to show that spatial analysis — looking at space and making maps — is valuable for a community that has never thought about it before,” he says. “I wanted to use spatial analysis to reveal new insights about basketball.”

A huge basketball fan, Goldsberry divided the scoring area of a basketball court into a grid of 1,284 unique “shooting cells.” He then analyzed all 700,000 field goal attempts from 2006 to 2011, using a mix of statistical, mapping and graphic design software on his personal computer. His goal was to find the most effective shooter from the most locations on the court.

His research revealed that the Phoenix Suns’ Steve Nash is the best shooter from the most places on the court. Nash scored from 31.6 percent of the total scoring area. The Boston Celtics’ Ray Allen ranked second at 30.1 percent, followed by the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant at 29.8 percent. The average NBA shooter scored from 18.5 percent of the total scoring area.

Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State University, also produced visual charts on NBA players, showing where they take and make most of their shots. For example, his analysis showed that the Dallas Mavericks’ Dirk Nowitzki shoots few 3-point shots, but he scores often in the midrange area on the left-hand side of the court.

In March 2012 Goldsberry presented his research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and received plenty of media attention.

“This is not going to replace existing methods of evaluating performance, but it will complement them and supply people in sports with a new lens to examine performance and understand sports,” he says.

The Dean's List: 50 Must-Read Higher Education Technology Blogs

EdTech Staff — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:53:04 +0000

IT administrators, professors and CIOs are driven by the needs — and rising expectations — of students. In the world of higher education, technology is a catalyst for real growth. Topics like online learning, “bring your own device,” electronic textbooks and cloud computing are hot in the industry right now, and rightfully so.

Technology is creating better learning environments, faster and more efficient access to resources such as e-mail and online lectures — and, ultimately, a better experience for professors and students.

What about the men and women behind all that campus technology? IT workers need resources too. EdTech: Focus on Higher Education has surveyed the web and found what we believe are the 50 best IT blogs in higher education. These blogs — including well-known names and some who are less familiar — cover every aspect of technology, both in the classroom and behind the scenes. Learn from tech experts and IT peers at colleges who are in the trenches. Dig into the very best the web has to offer.

Has your blog been selected? Click here to get your badge.

We also have an OPML file with RSS feeds of all 50 Must-Read IT Blogs for your convenience. Google provides assistance on importing the OPML file into Google Reader.

American Sentinel University's Information Technology Blog

What makes a blog a must-read? Thoughtful posts that inform its audience. That is exactly what American Sentinal accomplishes with its IT blog, which covers hardcore tech issues such as big data, as well as inspirational stories such as one chronicling how a stay-at-home mom launched her IT career taking online courses.

| Read the blog: americansentinel.edu/blog/category/it

Blog HighEd

The team at BlogHighEd aggregates content from their network of higher ed bloggers, including webmasters, marketers, counselors, providers and consultants. Created by Brad J Ward and Matt Herzberger, you can look forward to posts from a community of knowleadgable and experienced bloggers.

| Read the blog: bloghighed.org

Christina Bello - ITS Technology Tips

Loyola University Chicago's IT Services Department uses their highly focused Technology Tips blog to educate students about how to use popular technologies and protect against current security threats. Lots of information, easily consumed.

| Read the blog: blogs.luc.edu/techtips

Cisco Education Blog

Cisco Systems is one of the largest technology companies in the world, with more than 60,000 employees. This blog homes in on their specialty — networks — and showcases colleges that are implementing efficient and innovative technology.

| Read the blog: blogs.cisco.com/category/education

College Open Textbooks Community Blog

The Community College Open Textbooks Collaborative’s blog keeps its readers updated on trends driving adoption of electronic and open textbooks. The organization also has an active online community of bloggers reporting from the trenches.

| Read the blog: collegeopentextbooks.ning.com/profiles/blog/list

Cyber Pop Blog

Sidneyeve Matrix's Cyberpop is a rich and visually stimulating trend-watching blog that examines the effect of digital popular culture on education, among other things. Matrix is assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

| Read the blog: cyberpopblog.com

Dave Olsen - Mobile in Higher Ed

Dave Olsen is a programmer and project manager at West Virginia University. A leader in mobile technology, Olsen has released several major mobile solutions for WVU, including a robust mobile website and an iPhone app. He shares lessons learned and offers tips for colleagues who want to join the mobile revolution.

| Read the blog: www.dmolsen.com/mobile-in-higher-ed

DePaul University's Instructional Design and Development Blog

DePaul University's Instructional Design and Development blog is the online voice of the Faculty Instructional Technology Services department. Engaging topics and a deep bench of well-qualified contributors make this blog an intriguing read.

| Read the blog: iddblog.org

Digital Tweed

Written by Kenneth "Casey" Green, the founding director of The Campus Computing Project, Digital Tweed chronicles the ongoing evolution of technology in higher education. Thoughtful and comprehensive posts make this blog a must-read. Be prepared to step outside your comfort zone because, as Green lets us know, "a little dissonance can be a good thing."

| Read the blog: insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed

Dr. Rey Junco - Social Media in Higher Education

Interested in how social media impacts the daily lives of college students? Dr. Rey Junco is a professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania and a lab mentor for the Youth and Media project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In his blog, he presents his ongoing research on the integration of social media and the classroom.

| Read the blog: blog.reyjunco.com

Duke University's Center for Instructional Technology Blog

The staff of the Duke University Center for Instructional Technology writes posts for this blog about technology at large as well as the campus's specific resources. The "Get Ideas" section of their website is a rich supplement of strategies for using technology, including examples drawn straight from Duke's classrooms.

| Read the blog: cit.duke.edu/blog

Educause

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit dedicated to providing resources to IT leaders in higher education. In addition to the community blogs, check out EDUCAUSE's awesome online resources, FAQ's, professional development courses and major initiatives.

| Read the blog: educause.edu/blogs

EDUniverse

EDUniverse, which includes posts from more than 400 contributors, covers a variety of topics including technology, video, mobile, social media and marketing. This is more than a blog… it's a community of smart people exchanging ideas.

| Read the blog: http://www.eduniverse.org/posts

e-Literate

Ed Tech is both a hobby and a profession for some. Apart from his job as senior program manager of the MindTap learning environment at Cengage Learning, Michael Feldstein maintains this blog as a space for his own and some featured writers’ thoughts on “whatever is interesting” in the world of ed tech.

| Read the blog: mfeldstein.com

Elon Technology Blog

Published by the IT staff at Elon University, this blog offers in-the-trenches advice for all users of educational technology. It has several great contributors and even a YouTube channel to complement the site. For universities that use Moodle, this is a blog to watch.

| Read the blog: blogs.elon.edu/technology

Eric Stoller's Blog

Eric Stoller "gets" social media (he has almost 8,000 Twitter followers) and he has more than 10 years of experience in student affairs technology. This is a pro from whom anyone can learn. He is also a contributor to Higher Ed Live.

| Read the blog: ericstoller.com/blog

Globe University's IT Blog

Globe University is one of the leaders in virtual and remote learning, offering many online classes and degree programs. Its blog pinpoints practical applications of technology and timely news bites for a busy, connected audience.

| Read the blog: blogs.globeuniversity.edu

Hack Education

Audrey Watters will keep you informed and entertained as she covers the spectrum of technology and education. Hack Education also jointly produces a weekly podcast in which Watters and colleague Steve Hargadon discuss the latest ed tech news.

| Read the blog: hackeducation.com

Hanover Research Higher Education Blog

Hanover Research publishes a rich and stimulating scholarly blog, analyzing the findings of a broad selection of educational researchers. Stay up to date on marketing, teaching trends, e-learning and instructional design, among other topics.

| Read the blog: hanoverresearch.com/category/higher-education-blog

Higher Ed Live

Want to change things up a bit? Check out Higher Ed Live's weekly web shows on admissions, student affairs, innovation and technology. You can watch all their past shows on their YouTube channel but you can tune-in to a live show Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays.

| Read the blog: higheredlive.com

Higher Innovation

In his role as chief technology officer for Microsoft Education, Cameron Evans writes about how technology can empower students of all ages.

| Read the blog: higherinnovation.com

Instructional Technology Virtual Café

The University of Cincinnati's Instructional Technology Virtual Café delivers a smorgasbord of tech information for every palate. On the menu: blogs dedicated to developing and using video presentations; faculty training and support; and instructional design and online course content.

| Read the blog: blog.msbb.uc.edu/thecafe

Jeff Selingo's Blog

Jeff Selingo, editorial director of The Chronicle of Higher Education, draws on 15 years of experience reporting in the world of higher education. In addition to his eponymous blog, he writes a regular blog, Next, for The Chronicle, in which he explores innovation in education, and is also an education blogger for The Huffington Post.

| Read the blog: jeffselingo.com/blog

Jerry Bishop - The Higher Ed CIO

Jerry Bishop's blog is written for CIOs, but it draws readers of all stripes. For IT leaders, he wants to help shift the approach from tactical to strategic, as a means of increasing the value of technology for their institutions. Non-techies get "a glimpse behind the IT curtain into how the sausage is made."

| Read the blog: blog.thehigheredcio.com

Jerry Waldron - Campus Technology

Jerry Waldron is the CIO at The College of New Jersey. His blog about emerging technologies, Campus Technology, is written with an eye toward new and continuing college students.

| Read the blog: freshmantech.blogspot.com

Jim Hall's Blog

Jim Hall, director of IT at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has been blogging about "leadership and vision" in higher education IT since 2008. He keeps his community up to date on every angle of technology — from networks, security and privacy issues to his hilarious but spot-on "leadership lessons" for a tech-driven world.

| Read the blog: blog.lib.umn.edu/jhall/blog

Karine Joly - College Web Editor

College Web Editor is an independent resource for online marketers, website managers and PR professionals at universities. Karine Joly's experience developing online curricula for university executives allows her to bring unique insight to this niche. Example: How a high-profile university president used Twitter to diffuse a very public hiring crisis.

| Read the blog: collegewebeditor.com/blog

Kelly Walsh - EmergingEdTech

Every weekend, Kelly Walsh, CIO at The College of Westchester in White Plains, N.Y., begins what he calls a "conversation" on a specific technology topic, posting an initial blog entry and video that he then expands on throughout the week as the conversation grows. On Fridays, he puts it all together in a "tweet-wrap" of the week's postings and resources.

| Read the blog: emergingedtech.com

Kevin Corbett's Blog

Kevin Corbett’s site is a customized news aggregation area for the latest information in online learning, mobile learning, game-based design, technology and robotics.

| Read the blog: kevincorbett.com

Lakeland Learning Technologies

Bill Knapp, dean of learning technologies at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio, makes time for informative posts across a gamut of topics of interest to his faculty, from blended learning to Twitter in the classroom to appropriate use of open textbooks.

| Read the blog: lakelandlearningtechnologies.wordpress.com

Mark Guzdial - Computing Education Blog

For Mark Guzdial, how people understand technology is perhaps more important than the technology itself. Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, takes on issues of teaching and learning about computing in his blog.

| Read the blog: computinged.wordpress.com

Megan Ura's Blog

Megan Ura is the computer training coordinator at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. She blogs about web design and development and social media. Great insight from a recent college grad working in higher ed.

| Read the blog: meganura.tumblr.com

National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education Blog

How does technology mesh with the unique mission of a liberal arts college? Is there a place for learning to write code in arts and sciences curricula? What is a digital humanist? The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education attempts to answer these questions and more in its blog.

| Read the blog: blogs.nitle.org

NspireD

A publication of Notre Dame's Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, this blog encourages expansive thinking about how to apply technology as a tool for learning both in and out of the classroom. Posting almost daily, this is a good read for faculty and students alike.

| Read the blog: ltlatnd.wordpress.com

On The Go with Ed Cabellon

Ed Cabellon ruminates on the intersection of emerging technology, social media and higher education. As director of the Campus Center at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, Cabellon is dedicated to building a better campus community through the effective use of technology.

| Read the blog: edcabellon.com

ProfHacker

The Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker blog is a prolific (three times daily plus Twitter supplements) discussion of pedagogy, productivity and technology — "the daily work of university life," say its editors. Posts are written and edited by a wide-ranging group of academics from all disciplines.

| Read the blog: chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker

Ray Schroeder - Educational Technology

Ray Schroeder, professor emeritus and director of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield, developed this blog as a "scholarly chronicle" covering all facets of educational technology practice and pedagogy. Since 2002, he has curated daily posts from educators, researchers and reporters nationwide.

| Read the blog: people.uis.edu/rschr1/et

Rutger's OIRT Blog

The Office of Information Technology at Rutgers provides information for professors, students and any IT department smart enough to follow along. Highly recommended for IT managers at large universities.

| Read the blog: oirt.rutgers.edu/category/blog

Stay Safe Online

The National Cyber Security Alliance is a nonprofit public-private partnership that works primarily with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and industry sponsors such as Cisco Systems, McAfee and Symantec to educate “digital citizens” about safe use of the Internet. An essential resource for students and IT professionals.

| Read the blog: staysafeonline.org/blog

Tame the Web

Michael Stephens, a professor at San Jose State University in California, writes about the intersection of libraries, technology and people, in a manner that will engage any consumer of the digital or printed word. He also writes a regular blog with an ed-tech bent, Office Hours, for Library Journal.

| Read the blog: tametheweb.com

UMassOnline Blog

The UMassOnline blog has chronicled distance learning since 2008. It fosters a community of learning for staff and students alike. According to CEO Ken Udas, "Blogging, and the easy access to — and exchange of — ideas that it has spawned, is having a transformative effect on education."

| Read the blog: umassonlineblog.com

University Business

As the online voice of the widely read University Business magazine, this blog covers higher education technology, news, finance, policy and more. Editor-in-Chief Tim Goral and Managing Editor Melissa Ezarik are regular contributors.

| Read the blog: universitybusiness.com/blogs

University of Mississippi's TECHNews

You can't accuse Ole Miss of being "old school." It recently launched a mobile website and a mobile app, and it uses QR codes in orientation brochures. Even better, the IT team documents campus tech news in an blog that should prove worthwhile reading for IT professionals working on other campuses.

| Read the blog: technews.blog.olemiss.edu

University of Oregon's IT Blog

At the University of Oregon, the College of Arts and Sciences Information Technology (CASIT) blog provides a wealth of information about technology on and off campus — covering everything from how to use Blackboard to the latest tech upgrades in Eugene, Ore., where OU lives. There's even a tutorial on typefaces.

| Read the blog: casitweb.uoregon.edu/blog

University of Wyoming's IT Blog

The University of Wyoming IT blog is written primarily to teach students about campus technology resources, but its tutorials and question-and-answer format make it useful for anyone who wants to learn about emerging technologies.

| Read the blog: uwithelpdesk.wordpress.com

UW Bothell Learning Technologies Blog

The University of Washington Bothell blog focuses on integrating emerging technologies to enhance the classroom experience for both students and faculty. UWB bloggers also frequently look beyond campus to cutting-edge applications in classrooms worldwide.

| Read the blog: depts.washington.edu/etuwb/ltblog

WCET Frontiers

The five "blog-ologists" at the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, or WCET for short, report from the "frontiers of the e-learning policy and practice wilderness," sharing knowledge on educational technology as fast as it develops.

| Read the blog: wcetblog.wordpress.com

West Virginia University Tech Blog

The information technology team at West Virginia University puts out a great deal of useful and timely information, on everything from how to clean your mobile devices to protecting against the latest security threats.

| Read the blog: blog.oit.wvu.edu

Wires Crossed

This blog is a project of the Yale Instructional Technology Group, created to explore the mobile habits and technology needs of Yale University students. The blog is maintained by five Yale undergraduates who write about emerging technology and how it affects their educational experience.

| Read the blog: wirescrossedblog.tumblr.com

Yale University's Instructional Technology Blog

The Yale Instructional Technology Group's blog supports and celebrates the digital humanities work of its Arts and Sciences faculty and students. Numerous links to online content and presentations.

| Read the blog: itg.yale.edu/blog

If your blog is one of the ones featured in our 50 Must-Read IT Blog list, you can grab a badge here.

Colleges Expand Studies in Sports Analytics

Ryan Petersen — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:26:41 +0000

The popularity of the book and recent movie Moneyball about how the Oakland Athletics made the 2002 playoffs in baseball has rekindled interest in analytics as a performance-enhancing tool.

In the NBA, video cameras track player and ball movements, capturing data on everything from the trajectory of shots to the number of dribbles and passes per player.

Now professional golf has a new metric — strokes gained-putting — that Mark Broadie of the Columbia Business School developed to help professional golfers improve performance on the green. The metric combines the PGA TOUR's ShotLink data and Broadie's own equations. Broadie says the latest developments in sports analytics are now attracting students to careers in sports management, luring them away from jobs in finance or business. And, an important element of the appeal is computer science skills.

"A lot of the people who do sports analytics come from economics or business," Broadie says. "But with the amount of data coming out the last few years, you also need basic computer science skills to handle all that data and provide a new perspective." To read about the rise of sports analytics on campus, turn to "The Numbers Game" on Page 18.

A Cloudy Path

As many IT staffs weigh their best path to the cloud, Middle Tennessee State University CIO Bruce Petryshak says there's no such thing as a "one-size-fits-all" approach.

That's why MTSU uses a mix of private- and public-cloud services. The university built a private internal cloud to deliver virtual access to applications. To find out what factors are motivating campus cloud choices, read "All of the Above" on Page 22.

The issue also features stories about critical networking topics, including:

Deploying a Cisco Systems Unified Computing System at F.I.T. Aviation in Melbourne, Fla.: "Flying High" on Page 26;
Building out an IT backbone to support a "bring your own device" initiative at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas: "Anytime, Anywhere, Any Device" on Page 34.

Technology of all stripes continues to play a vital role in defining the modern university. We hope this issue inspires your IT team to embrace the possibilities.

Must-Read Higher Ed IT Blogger Badge

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:12:47 +0000

Is your blog featured on the EdTech Must-Read IT Blogs list? You can share this with your readers by embedding a badge on your site. There are three sizes available:

100 pixel-wide badge

<a href="http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2012/05/50-must-read-higher-education-technology-blogs"></a><br /> <a href='http://www.edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2012/05/50-must-read-higher-education-technology-blogs'>EdTech's Must-Read Higher Ed IT Blogs</a>

150 pixel-wide badge

300 pixel-wide badge

Back to 50 Must-Read Higher Ed It Blogs list

When Deduping Primary Data Makes Sense

Sandra Gittlen — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:38:22 +0000

IT departments tend to shy away from deduplicating primary storage because of its potential performance impact. They fear the trade-off between the time it takes to identify and dedupe production data and the eventual gains in bandwidth and disk capacity.

However, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) says today’s relentless storage demands are pushing aside any wariness of the technology and its possible productivity slowdowns.

“We have seen a proliferation of storage utilization by most applications as well as backup, so if we can reduce the number of blocks that have to be stored and backed up, we’ll save money,” says Michael Barker, assistant vice chancellor for infrastructure and operations and chief technology officer at UNC.

Greg Schulz, founder and senior adviser to the Server and StorageIO Group, says data that is not time-sensitive can be a candidate for primary storage deduplication. For instance, virtual desktop infrastructure, registration information and classroom records can take up space and present an opportunity to trade some data reduction time for storage space.

“Instead of waiting till data is sent to backup systems to be reduced, higher education institutions can perform that task on the source side, realizing immediate space-saving benefits,” Schulz says.

UNC uses NetApp’s FAS3270 appliance to eliminate duplicate blocks within primary storage. The savings goal is to reclaim 20 percent of capacity through data deduplication. The university also uses thin provisioning and flexible cloning techniques to drive further efficiencies. As it adds more applications to the deduplication pool, the university anticipates reaching a 50 percent return on usable space. “We expect our 280-terabyte spinning file system to present itself to our 27,000 students, faculty and staff as 400TB of available space,” Barker says.

5 Cloud Computing Tips For Every IT Department

Heather B. Hayes — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:43:10 +0000

University officials taking a multipronged approach to cloud computing recommend the following lessons learned to other colleges considering a similar path.

Communicate: IT executives need to fully explain to all stakeholders how various cloud offerings work, why the university is using them, and how the cloud will benefit end users and the overall educational mission. Middle Tennessee State University officials made it a point to speak directly to IT personnel and end users, routinely sent e-mail updates and established a project website. The site included an online "rumor mill" application so officials could correct any misinformation. "Just because you say it doesn't mean it gets heard," says Bruce Petryshak, CIO at MTSU. "So we've used many, many avenues to get the word out."

Start small: MTSU started its virtual desktop service with a proof of concept and a small pilot to work out any kinks and illustrate benefits before deploying it campuswide.

Adjust your style: With the cloud, IT officials must manage based on contracts, compliance and audits, so colleges need to evaluate potential cloud partners very deliberately, and prepare IT personnel for this new reality.
"The trouble with the cloud is you only have a limited view behind the curtain, so to speak, of what they're going to be doing once the contract is under way," says Gabriel Youtsey, IT project manager at UC Davis. "So your relationship will be built solely on trust and on the contract terms that you work out ahead of time."

Take a seat at the table: The IT department — not just university procurement authorities and attorneys — needs to be front and center on any contract negotiation for public- or hybrid-cloud services, says Paul Grieggs, technical services manager at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Another important issue is an exit strategy. "Traditionally, the IT shop would build the security and the service levels; now, they're buying security and service levels," Grieggs explains. "The attorneys don't know anything about, for instance, getting data normalized so you can recover it after the service ends. So IT needs to be right in the middle of all of that."

Expand your cost analysis: Traditionally, an IT project's cost equaled the sum of its implementation and operational expenses. But a cloud project also needs to take into consideration what it will cost if the IT department needs to pull it back in-house for any reason, explains Brian D. Voss, CIO for the University of Maryland. The analysis is particularly helpful if the cloud service experiences technical problems. "Having the analysis helps the community understand what it will really cost to pull out of the arrangement, and that makes it easier for you to make the case that it's worth giving it some time and struggling through some of the growing pains," Voss explains.

Pros and Cons of Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds

Heather B. Hayes — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:41:42 +0000

A public cloud refers to a service that offers applications and IT functions to a general customer base with very few opportunities for individualization. However, higher education officials often define a public cloud as one that is hosted off premises by a third-party provider, but is protected in the sense that it is governed by a negotiated contract and includes customized pricing, service and security levels, as well as a strategy for data return should the arrangement end.

PROS: No capital investment; access to economies of scale and specialized knowledge; predictable, pay-as-you-go costs
CONS: Loss of control over institutional data; less ability to customize and prioritize how resources are managed
POPULAR USES: Student e-mail, storage, standard productivity software, non-core business applications

A private cloud is created for and used expressly by an individual college or university.

PROS: Control of data location, resource provisioning, security, service levels and compliance measures; improved flexibility and remote access
CONS: Resource-intensive and expensive; requires specialized IT expertise
POPULAR USES: Faculty and staff e-mail, enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources and finance systems, learning management systems (LMS), classroom applications

A hybrid cloud within higher education typically comes in two flavors. The first is a cloud run by a consortium or a higher education–focused provider for use only by a group of academic institutions. The second is an arrangement in which the underlying infrastructure, or all or part of the application, is hosted offsite by a public cloud provider, but more sensitive components (and sometimes the application itself) are maintained within a private cloud by the higher education institution.

PROS: Speed to market; access to specialized application knowledge and high-capacity IT resources
CONS: Loss of control
POPULAR USES: ERP, LMS, high-performance computing, massive data storage and management

Read about Middle Tennessee State's move to the cloud.

Colleges Take Many Paths to the Cloud

Heather B. Hayes — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:26:17 +0000

Officials at Middle Tennessee State University decided early on that cloud computing was right for them. But what cloud model would be most appropriate for MTSU's 27,000 students, faculty and staff — public, private or a hybrid of the two?

Check the box for all of the above, says Bruce Petryshak, MTSU's vice president for information technology and CIO. "There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to the cloud, especially in a higher education environment," he says.

MTSU built a private internal cloud the university calls "C@M–Cloud at Middle" that delivers virtual access to standard desktop and classroom applications. At the same time, MTSU migrated student e-mail, a campuswide scheduling application. a learning management system and its web content management system to public cloud services.

Proceed with Caution

MTSU's multipronged plan is not unusual. Most colleges are taking a cautious approach to the cloud, with the majority focusing on internal efforts while at the same time investigating hybrid models and public services, says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project.

"Higher education, like a lot of market segments, has been talking about the cloud for a long time. But if you compare deployment in higher ed to other segments that have the same kind of technology complexity, I would say that we lag," Green says.

That's especially true when it comes to public-cloud use, which has thus far been limited to applications such as student e-mail, scheduling and calendaring.

There are many reasons for this reluctance. For starters, technology providers that focus on higher education have been slower to come out with cloud offerings, including enterprise, resource and planning solutions. However, most colleges balk at signing on with public-cloud services because of concerns about security. Administrators are focused on the potential for mishandling or misuse of data that's regulated under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), as well as the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and federal export/import control laws.

"I think it's striking — and it speaks to the issue of trust — that campuses have not yet migrated their institutional e-mail for faculty and administration in the same percentages that they've migrated student e-mail," Green says. "Higher education likes to hold things close, and it's just something that takes time in terms of changing the culture, changing budgets and building trust. It's going to be a slow process."

Brian D. Voss, vice president of information technology and CIO at the University of Maryland, agrees. For his institution, a campus-based private cloud is the first and most critical steppingstone to broader cloud adoption. Although the institution has moved its student e-mail to a public cloud offered by Google, its central IT department is building an internal cloud in anticipation of soon hosting faculty and staff e-mail and other institutional academic and mission-critical applications.

"If I can provide a local cloud and get my eggs in a single basket, then I can start to make decisions about what to do with the basket," he explains, noting that his first challenge is convincing personnel within a distributed academic and IT environment to accept that a private cloud run by central IT won't undermine their control or value.

76% of higher education institutions say that they were able to reduce the cost of applications by an average of 21% after moving them to the cloud.

SOURCE: 2011 CDW•G Cloud Tracking Poll

The logical next step beyond the private "campus" cloud, Voss says, is migrating certain university applications to hybrid clouds offered by a statewide or regional university consortium or an education-focused cloud provider, such as Internet2.

"At that point, you're in a semipublic environment, which takes away some sense of control. But it's being managed by people you know and have confidence in, rather than going to a major supplier who's also serving the world," Voss states. "It offers very real cost and efficiency benefits without taking you too far out of your comfort zone."

Easy First Steps

Another reason why many colleges are moving first to private clouds is that it's not a difficult journey. "The private cloud really lets you take advantage of your current investments in technology, and then you can drive up utilization of what you already have," says MTSU's Petryshak.

MTSU started on the road to cloud by first virtualizing its Citrix and VMware servers and deploying a NetApp storage area network. "We already had quite a bit invested in our networks and server infrastructure, so now we're just looking at that and saying, 'Well, I want to use that in a different way,' and so we just redeployed it in a different fashion," Petryshak explains.

Paul Grieggs, technical services manager at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), is also a fan of private clouds. He says they offer the university many of the efficiency, cost, ease of management and disaster recovery benefits offered by public clouds, while also providing continued control over data and the ability to maintain high service levels. The university has already moved its Moodle learning management system, a portion of its student management system, course-specific applications, and student and staff e-mail to a private cloud.

"If our instance of Moodle were to go down, for example, our No. 1 priority within the IUP cloud would be to get that application back up and running as quickly as possible," Grieggs notes. "But if that were out on a public cloud run by a provider that hosts applications for organizations from all over the world, I doubt very seriously if IUP's Moodle instance would be anywhere near the top of their priority list."

Still, IUP is more than willing to deploy applications and functions to a public cloud when certain criteria are met. An optimal candidate is a noncore business application that can be performed more efficiently and effectively by an outside provider, Grieggs says. Already, IUP has placed its parking management and facilities maintenance work-order systems with third-party hosted providers, and will soon move an online human resources search application to an external cloud.

"These are applications that were already out there, already built, and they have the economies of scale to host and manage those applications better and less expensively than we can. And because there isn't a need for a lot of customization, the workflow is essentially the same," Grieggs says.

However, there have been cases when IUP couldn't migrate an application to an external cloud because the provider wasn't willing to customize its offering or its contract.

"As a public university, we have boilerplate language that we have to follow, or we're simply not allowed to accept the contract," Grieggs explains. For example, any cloud provider that works with IUP must agree to have its services governed by the laws of Pennsylvania rather than those of the state where the cloud operation resides. "If you're talking about a small deployment, a provider is probably not going to hire an attorney to negotiate parts of their standard contract," he adds.

The Truth Is in the Testing

At the University of California at Davis, the IT staff finds that hybrid clouds are a great way to test out the cloud's parameters and potential while also guarding against risk. UC Davis, for example, is partnering with the other nine UC campuses to run PeopleSoft HR and finance applications via a platform as a service that will be operated by Oracle.

This cloud arrangement offers the best of all worlds. "The service provider delivers and runs all the underlying infrastructure — the networks, the operating systems, the storage — but we still have control over the applications running in the hosted environment," explains Peter M. Siegel, CIO for UC Davis and vice provost for information and educational technology.

"It's a compromise of sorts, but it works for us. And so we're trying out all of these 'as a service' variations, and we think that it will ultimately pave the way for more and more of the university's critical systems to be moved to a cloud environment."

UC Davis is also working with Microsoft on a hybrid arrangement that offers Office 365 e-mail, calendaring, productivity and collaboration tools via Microsoft's public cloud, but keeps some Exchange e-mail services for faculty and staff within a private cloud at the university. Since 2008, student e-mail has been provided via the Google Apps for Education cloud service.

"One key factor that made us feel really comfortable with this model is that the public cloud integrates so well with our on-campus Exchange environment that we now have a data portability model that allows us to easily migrate mailboxes to and from campus," Siegel explains.

"The service looks the same and feels the same, and it gives us real comfort knowing that we're not completely locked in and can move accounts from the cloud to the campus if we need to."

The arrangement is expected to be so positive that the IT staff at UC Davis is set to conduct a pilot project to determine if Microsoft's Azure cloud platform can effectively host, store and process the university's large-scale genomics research. Data would be transmitted from the cloud over the California Research and Education Network, a high-speed network developed by the UC system and managed by a consortium of academic institutions.

"All of this is very exciting and potentially revolutionary," Siegel says. If colleges and universities can get past the various control hurdles and negotiate good, quality contracts for hybrid or public clouds that reduce costs and add efficiencies, "then we think it will absolutely be the way for us and other colleges to go in the future."

Five Tips for Efficient Deduplication

Sandra Gittlen — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:17:33 +0000

Deduplication is powerful technology, but it has to be managed properly. Follow these steps for a successful deployment.

Know your objective. With the price of data storage dropping, deduplication is now very affordable. Rather than cost savings, consider deduplication for its ability to reclaim disk space, thereby giving the organization more from current storage investments and faster site-to-site backup data transfers.
Study the application environment. Not all data dedupes well. For instance, databases are notoriously poor matches for this technology. Carry out a proof of concept to ensure you're going to get the most from your deduplication efforts.
Recognize that the first deduping takes the longest. IT experts warn that the initial deduplication is often a long process, so schedule your time and network availability accordingly. After the first backup, deduping should speed up considerably.
Deduplication might not be the answer. Rather than spending time and money on deduping student-held data, Utah State University chose to have it all stored in the cloud with third-party providers. That way, IT can focus its limited budget on better protecting university assets.
Take your time. Don't try to dedupe everything right off the bat. Start with an application or two and observe how it reacts to the process. Doing too much all at once won't give you the chance to understand dedupe's impact on each type of data.

Learn how deduplication is helping universities manage expanding data requirements.

Deduplication Helps Universities Manage Expanding Data Requirements

Sandra Gittlen — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:09:58 +0000

Necessity really is the mother of invention. At least that's the case at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, where the need for off-siting of backups finally convinced the IT department to move away from tape backups.

"We used to be decentralized, back up everything to tape, and then take those tapes offsite to a bank vault. With reductions in our operations staff, we didn't have the people to do that anymore," says Seth Bokelman, senior systems administrator at UNI.

Centralizing backups solved the IT staffing issue at the 13,000-student university, but it introduced other challenges — namely, heavy traffic loads as data was replicated between two main sites across 90 miles. "We needed to support 26 terabytes of backups using existing connectivity," he says.

The solution was deduplication with ExaGrid System's EX13000E backup appliance. Deduplication eliminates storage of redundant data at the block or file level, shrinking backup windows and disk space and bandwidth requirements. The technology is critical for colleges and universities that are working hard to manage decreased infrastructure budgets while retaining more student, faculty and staff data.

"Consider deduplication when gaining more storage space is your main objective, or if you need backups to take less time," says Greg Schulz, founder and senior adviser to the Server and StorageIO Group.

EMC, Fujitsu, IBM, NetApp and Quantum all offer deduplication in their backup storage systems.

Bokelman says UNI deployed two ExaGrid appliances at the primary site and one at a disaster recovery site in Ames, Iowa. The ExaGrid configuration has let the IT staff store 27TB of data on only about 3TB of disk space. Bokelman credits selective deduplication for the dramatic results.

"There are some applications and data, such as video, that are inefficient to store, so you have to be careful what you use deduplication resources for," he says. For instance, the IT department uses dedupe only for student systems, such as assignment data, official documents, IS data and other formats that are likely to spawn multiple copies.

Bokelman warns his peers not to consider deduplication as a less expensive alternative to tape because, in some cases, it can cost up to three times more. "Instead, it lets us do things we couldn't do with tape, such as automatically replicate to a distant site," he says. Other benefits include the ability to run more concurrent backup and restore jobs, elimination of tape management and rotation, and increased reliability from no longer having to move tape around.

Justify the Expense

5 TIPS Deduplication can save you space, time and money but it most be done correctly.

Learn more

Eric Hawley, CIO of Utah State University, agrees that the benefits of deduplication can justify the expense. The 29,000-student institution, based in Logan, was able to reassign a full-time IT staffer in part because deduplication relieves the data center staff of tape management responsibilities.

In 2008, the university was maxing out its 30TB storage area network. Adding another SAN would have increased complexity and required more personnel. To simplify overall management, the IT department switched to EMC's Data Domain DD670 Deduplication Storage System to minimize used disk space. While the university currently has just under 484TB of stored data, only 54TB of disk space is actually being used.

Like Bokelman, Hawley has been choosy about the data that gets deduped. "We look for what's going to give us the biggest bang for our buck," he says. Video files typically are not deduped, nor is institutional data such as scanned documents, which don't have enough identical copies to make the potential process overhead worth it. More likely candidates are e-mail, central file stores, enterprise resource planning backup sets and registrar data.

Deduplication has helped USU keep more data on disk before it's transferred to tape. Previously, the university could retain only a week of backups. Now, certain backup sets never have to be copied off because there is plenty of room on the disk.

The biggest advantage: "It's a lot easier to manage a single data domain box than it would be to manage two or three SANs," Hawley says.

Versatile Deduping

At Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, deduplication is so helpful that they use it for both primary and backup storage. The college performs centralized backups between buildings situated across campus from one another. Using NetApp's FAS 2050 appliances, the IT department can store a month of backups. "If we turn dedupe off, that span narrows to a week or two," says Greg Flanik, the college's CIO.

Flanik says deduplication is worth the investment when institutions can realize a 40 to 50 percent improvement in available disk space across the board. "If that doesn't happen, we don't dedupe that application," he says. For example, IT staff found, via vetting, that some admissions databases weren't good candidates for deduplication.

Baldwin-Wallace also was able to pare down its backup window. "Without deduplication, we'd bleed into peak usage and infringe on network performance," he says. "Shortening that alone cost-justifies deduplication."