Leonard DeBotton

Concurrent Track
Improving Blackboard, Load balancers, SAN's and Load Testing Performance on your campus
  Session I, Thursday 10:30am - 11:30am
  

Biography

Leonard DeBotton is currently the Vice President of Info Sys at Berkeley College. My entire 18 year career has been in Higher Education at Berkeley College starting out as a COBOL programmer, system administrator, IT Director then Vice President of IS. I am currently pursuing a Masters in Information Systems. I have presented at past NJEDge.Net events and was a member of the program committee for 2007 NJEDge.Net annual conference. I am also a member of the national Blackboard Conference. I have also served on advisory boards for distance learning systems.

Jean Daros works at Berkeley College in the Information Systems department.
She started with Berkeley College over 11 years as a technician and has advanced to the Blackboard Administrator and is now the Senior Systems Integrator.

Mike Wilson is a Systems Engineer who joined Berkeley College in 2005 as a Systems Administrator. Mike has a BS in Computer Engineering from NJIT, and has been working in Information Technology for 7 years.

Abstract

Your college uses Blackboard and you restart your servers daily, courses load slow, and the system crashes frequently. If you are lucky your staff can reset your servers quick enough so that your users do not notice the problem. If that scenario sounds familiar, then come see how Berkeley College’s seven campus system transitioned its’ Blackboard system into an enterprise class system, consisting of multiple servers, load balancing equipment and height speed storage area networks.

Berkeley was faced with various performance issues on our Blackboard system. With the help of a responsive helpdesk we were able to minimize the outages, but that was not good enough. After reading multiple news groups we quickly found out that we were not alone – Blackboard is a complex system that needs performance tuning, in order to perform optimality. Sadly none if this was needed in the past in order to keep a very stable system, until the release of version 7.0.

After attending various conferences and talking to top level Blackboard engineers we managed to drastically improve performance and stability. We also managed to make Blackboard a very scalable system where we can add applications servers to the network fairly quickly. We went from not being able to keep Blackboard up for a week to now having it up and running continually as we can now bring down app servers as needed for maintenance without our users experiencing any downtime.

During our session we will review what we did to get Berkeley College to where we are today. If you have any of the issues we mentioned, then you can not afford not to attend this session.