Streaming Projects

As we look to the fall term with the dependence on our Streaming services increasing rapidly (content for academic courses, some of it  delivered in Blackboard, iLecture using it as a primary delivery option, the completion of the move of content from the School of Law, John Hope Franklin Center and Arts & Sciences), we are persuing the following efforts: 

• We continue to expect from OIT's CASI Systems group the critical software update to the Helix Server to take care of a potential seurity threat.   We expect to have time to test thoroughly the upgrade before the commencement of classes. 
• We expect to have a new storage plan from CASI Systems as we move forward this fall.  We expect to max out our current storage on the Helix side in the next several weeks.  We may add storage to our X-serve raid or use AFS with control access.
• A monitoring modification should be in effect any day so we might know beofre our customers when a service is not functioning.
• There is a plan to deploy redundant servers for both the Helix side and the QTSS which will include the definition of a test suite to quickly put up a new version with access to the same content. These redundant servers will be deployed with a network load balancing solution in place as well.  These are essential enhancements to our infrastructure.
• Authenitcation, especially to the QTSS. will be provided, once resources are made available to address it in the near term (we hope before the end of 2005).

Recently, we have restated our standard outage time to tell customers: from midnight Friday night to 5am Saturday morning.  If/when there is a non-standard outage, we will get improved debriefing from CASI Systems.  We are describing in more detail the functional requirements required for Admin tools related to QTSS account and group creation.