The Directory Life Cycle

Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services > 24. Case Study: A Large University > An Overview of the Organization

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An Overview of the Organization

This case study is fictional, but it is based loosely on our experience designing, deploying, and maintaining the University of Michigan's directory service. It is not meant to be an accurate chronicle of that experience; we've changed the names and several key decisions to better illustrate various points. Therefore, we'll refer to the university as Big State University.

Big State University is a leading research and educational institution with an annual budget of over $2 billion. Big State employs more than 25,000 faculty and staff and enrolls more than 50,000 students in graduate and undergraduate programs in 17 schools and colleges. Large portions of Big State's budget and staff are associated with the Big State Medical Complex, one of the largest teaching hospitals and medical research centers in the world.

The majority of Big State faculty, staff, and students are located on the main campus in Springfield. Two other campuses are located in nearby cities, and Big State has associated offices and research facilities throughout the world. In addition, Big State has an alumni base of several hundred thousand people it wants to remain in contact with for fundraising and other purposes.

Organizationally, Big State has several large, central administrative divisions, including university-wide human resources, finance, student services, and information technology (IT) departments. The remainder of Big State's organization is divided into its 17 schools and colleges responsible for administering Big State's degree programs. The schools and colleges obtain human resources, finance, and student services from the central organizations, but they otherwise operate with a great deal of autonomy. This autonomy extends to most choices about information technology, meaning that individual schools and colleges are not required to use the central IT organization's computing services.

Big State has a leading-edge physical network infrastructure that supports high-bandwidth TCP/IP, IPX, and AppleTalk protocol transport. The main campus network is based around a 100Mbps fiber optic backbone. Most of the more than 250 buildings on the main campus have Ethernet connected to the backbone via high-speed links. Some buildings that have not yet been upgraded are connected at only 128Kbps, but this is the exception rather than the rule. The two satellite campuses are connected to the main campus via 1.5Mbps T1 links. The main campus fiber ring is connected to an Internet backbone provided by a commercial Internet service provider via a 45Mbps T3 link.

In this chapter we describe how Big State's directory team addressed each of the topics covered in the previous sections of this book: design, deployment, and maintenance of a directory service. We describe how Big State's requirements affected each stage, the applications that drove the deployment, and some of the lessons learned.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services,  2002 New Riders Publishing
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Index terms contained in this section

Big State University case study 2nd 3rd
case studies
          Big State University 2nd 3rd
directories
         case studies
                    Big State University 2nd 3rd

2002, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.



Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services
Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672323168
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 245

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