iOS 8 Release On Track To Crush Education Networks This Fall
Boston, MA (PRWEB) August 27, 2014 -- As students prepare to bring more mobile devices to campuses and classrooms this school year, Exinda, a global supplier of Network Orchestration solutions urges education network managers to take proactive measures to protect against large traffic spikes driven by student demand for the latest operating system from Apple. According to research firm ComScore, over 25 million Americans will update to the latest software, a level of demand set to outpace last year’s iOS 7 release which caused network outages across many colleges and K-12 school districts.
Last September many universities reported substantial network downtime and disruption during iOS 7 release week, leaving students unable to submit assignments on time or access online course material. Network World reported that colleges across the United States had to contend with up to five times more traffic than usual, while Campus Technology indicated several institutions saw bandwidth usage peak as high as 95 percent across network locations.
“On iOS 7 release day last year, some IT departments sent out school wide e-mails urging students to delay upgrading until they got home, but this kind of plea doesn’t work for students living on campus,” said Randy Ethridge, Network Engineer V at Eastern Illinois University. “We didn’t want to risk jeopardizing the performance of our key applications on campus so we cached the download at the network edge. By setting a policy using Exinda Edge Cache, we allowed the software to be downloaded once and then served up locally each time one of our users tried to download the update. Caching helped us avoid unnecessary strain and periods of downtime that many other schools faced.”
“The demand for iOS 7 completely blindsided many network managers last year and we’re expecting to see the same surges in traffic and application performance degradation again this year,” said Brendan Reid, VP of Marketing at Exinda. “The schools at greatest risk are those that do not yet have policies in place to control downloads and mobile device usage.”
To help schools prepare for the iOS 8 release happening this fall, Exinda has published an iOS 8 readiness guide to help IT managers identify the steps they can take to better control software downloads and prevent network outages.
About Exinda
Exinda is a leading global supplier of WAN solutions that enables organizations to assure a predictable user experience for strategic business applications through policy-based WAN Orchestration. Exinda solutions intelligently allocate network bandwidth and optimize traffic based on the priorities of the business. The company has helped more than 3,500 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.
Ryan Tollofson, Exinda, http://www.exinda.com, +1 (647) 558-4638, [email protected]
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