(Cross-posted to NETMAN) First off, let me extend my thanks to everyone who attended last weeks' NERCOMP Conference in Providence. Considering the winter we had, it was very nice to have beautiful weather for the conference. As I mentioned to one person, it's amazing how much closer the bars seem when it isn't raining!
I'd also like to thank those who attended the combined NETMAN/WIRELESS-LAN CG session. As is often the case, 50 minutes simply is not enough... as 6 or 7 of us ended up continuing the conversation in the hallway for another hour or so. In 2014, the hot topics were: * PoE - which standard; power budget on switches * Public IP vs NAT'ing. Are Res halls, Academic spaces and Administrative spaces treated differently? * NAC * Bandwidth shaping * Wired vs Wireless in Res Halls * AppleTV * Rogue Devices * Guest Access It was interesting to see that many of these have fallen off the immediate radar. A few were still there. Hot topics this year were: * Load balancing/Rate Shaping * How much bandwidth do you provision for your wireless locations? Are you rolling out 11ac? * Are you still wiring your Res Halls? Are you noting an uptick in wired usage .. any explanation? * What happened to SDN? * AppleTV and other media devices* With respect to bandwidth allocation to wireless locations, those of us who are using multi-radio devices are running more than a single Cat6 cable to those locations (I just commented about this on WIRELESS-LAN today). 11ac deployment was mixed. The cost - due to increased wiring and electronics (in the field and the data center) for those of us whose existing wireless network is primarily designed around 2.4GHz is a factor. Many of us are seeing a mild uptick in the usage of wired ports in our res halls (where available). No one had a good metric or explanation for this .. possibly the availability of consumer smart devices (ie TV's) and preference among gamers. SDN seems to have disappeared as a topic on NETMAN. I did notice that Interop is still pushing it hard. AppleTV doesn't appear to be as big a headache, but it's still on everyone's table. That ever-present Bonjour Discussion ensued. *On that (Bonjour) subject, I was looking over the list of available CG's on http://www.educause.edu/discuss and nothing stood out to me as being a good home for AV/multimedia/all-things-streaming. If I missed it, could someone drop me a line? If there isn't a CG, what are people's thoughts on a new CG? I'd be happy to contact EDUCAUSE about this. Thanks again to everyone who attended last week and thank you to everyone who keeps these lists lively and informative! -Brian ____________________________________ Brian Helman, M.Ed | Director, ITS/Networking Services | *: 978.542.7272 Salem State University, 352 Lafayette St., Salem Massachusetts 01970 GPS: 42.502129, -70.894779 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
