Saving Bandwidth and Britney

Computerworld - During a recent trip to the movies, I was greeted by Hollywood's not-so-subtle campaign to promote its view
that video piracy is sucking money out of the pockets of stunt doubles (never mind the stars). It's only a matter of time before music moguls warn me not to steal cash from Britney Spears' favorite Cartier salesclerk.
The music industry is already waving nasty letters in the faces of colleges and universities cautioning them to curtail piracy. Luckily there's a technology solution to the problem, which technology itself created.
The technology that created the problem is high-speed Internet access, which is available throughout the campuses of most educational institutions. Students and faculty members use the Internet for research and legitimate file sharing. There's considerable competition for the limited bandwidth. Add in less-than-legitimate downloads of music and video, and a lot of bandwidth gets chewed up.
Jon Dodds, manager of network and tech services at Fairmont State College in Fairmont, W.Va. (7,200 students, 450 faculty members), wanted to take control of his bandwidth. In the process, he has made sure that the school does its bit to promote compliance with copyright laws. He's quick to point out this isn't about censorship; it's about using resources effectively.
His quest led him to Bakersfield, Calif.-based Lightspeed Systems Inc. His initial success with the 30-day evaluation copy of the company's bandwidth management product led him to buy it.
"We started by doing bandwidth prioritization between the dorms and the main campus," Dodds says.
During business hours, campus connections have priority over dorm use, and Dodds can filter out certain IP addresses, block some peer-to-peer traffic and even segregate dorms by subnet. Using the graphic capabilities of the package, Dodds is able to see which protocols are using the most bandwidth and then allocate bandwidth as needed.
He uses the two servers that run the bandwidth management software in an array for fail-over protection, ensuring continuous connection to the network. Dodds even tests new configurations on one of the servers' arrays before promoting it to the primary array.
Prior to implementing the bandwidth management setup, Fairmont was considering purchasing additional bandwidth. That's now been shelved.
And as for pulling the plug on illegal music and video downloads, well, let's just say Britney can shop to her heart's content.
Pimm Fox is a freelance writer in Santa Barbara, Calif. Contact him at pimmfox@pacbell.net.