The curriculum material is scattered across roughly 25 network-attached storage servers. Chee estimates the amount of data at around 3 terabytes, and this is expected to triple within a few years. We have thought about implementing a SAN for better throughput, but theres no money for that right now. Maybe next year, if the budget allows.
In the more rural areas of the Hawaiian Islands, connectivity is limited and remote management of the data is complicated. These end nodes do not have the best connectivity, explains Chee. Some of them are on a 56K dial-up, some are on cable modems, and others are attached on a part-time basis to the hand-me-down satellite we got from the U.S. Army.
He says the content to be delivered includes large streaming audio of lectures and accompanying data files, all of which is extremely slow and expensive to download over a dial-up connection.
Chee was tasked with finding a way to pre-place content out at the fringes of the network, where it could be more easily accessed by the students and avoid clogging up the pipe during primetime. The solution needed to provide automated, rule-based synchronization of data on the NAS boxes over a wide-area network.
A network caching solution springs to mind. Chee says he would still have to manually push the data up to these boxes, and there isnt enough intelligence in them. We needed something that would provide an authenticated login, so that not everyone with access to the network could get to the curriculum. Chee also looked into offerings from Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL) but gave up and was on the verge of writing his own software program in Linux when he discovered Acirro Inc.
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