Exinda Prevents Mass iOS 7 Downloads from Crippling Campus Connectivity
Boston, MA (PRWEB) September 25, 2013 -- Students downloading Apple’s iOS 7 software update have caused education networks around the world to experience disruption and downtime, as Internet traffic doubled at many institutions. Demand for the new operating system caused college networks to exceed bandwidth capacity during peak hours, hindering productivity for students and faculty who depend on the network for learning and administrative applications.
Students and university officials took to social media and email as a plea to their peers to refrain from upgrading their devices as the spike in traffic was slowing down the network. As bandwidth usage rose at schools that were not adequately prepared, students and faculty struggled to access course materials, and complete assignments reliably. “Many organizations may think they have a handle on how different types of applications and services impact their network performance. But while they may have identified certain types of high bandwidth traffic, such as YouTube videos, or regular peak events, like Black Friday, there are always surprise events that can take a network’s performance down,” said Jim Rapoza, Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group. “Our research shows that businesses with an adaptive and dynamic solution that understands application and network traffic are best positioned to avoid issues from high traffic events like the recent iOS 7 downloads.”
With over 600 education customers in its community Exinda is familiar with the challenges presented by such mass Internet usage events. Since 2002 the company and its partners have provided network visibility and control solutions to this market segment which typically struggles to maintain fair share of bandwidth between students, teachers and faculty. These struggles are exacerbated during major events such as the Olympics or a major software upgrade.
“Exinda has been closely monitoring the situation and we are encouraged by the many positive reports from clients that our Network Control solution saved them from a potentially painful experience. With large numbers of students trying to download iOS 7 at the same time, many colleges found it was consuming all the available bandwidth, causing critical learning tools and cloud-based applications to perform poorly,” said Greg Veres, Vice President of Product Management at Exinda. “By using Exinda’s policy based control, schools were able to limit the amount of bandwidth the downloads consumed. Those campuses with our Edge Cache add-on were able to avoid multiple downloads by caching the entire iOS 7 upgrade. All subsequent requests were downloaded from the cache, greatly reducing the amount of bandwidth being consumed.”
About Exinda
Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN optimization and Network Control solutions. Exinda enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN optimization and Network Control that intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 3,000 organizations in over 80 countries worldwide assure application performance, improve the end-user experience, contain recreational applications and reduce network operating costs for the IT executive.
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Ryan Tollofson, Exinda, http://www.exinda.com, (647) 558-4638, [email protected]
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