sses.2.3.4.3 What needs to be put in place?We will need to make a large investment in equipment, software, and people to run it at the outset, but with correct resource management and planning there should not be a huge need for continued large capital expense once the initial infrastructure is in place.The first things that will need to be ordered are servers with enough hard drive capacity, processing power, and bandwidth. These servers will have to handle the task of streaming many classes at one time to potentially dozens of students as well as single connections to one student at a time when they are view stored classes. Using IPv6’s ability to multicast will save bandwidth at our end and reduce network traffic.The software and hardware will be the heart of our site. It will need to be user friendly, easy to maintain, and powerful enough to handle the behind-the-scenes work that will be needed. Many of the smaller association’s members may not have any or very little computer experience. Making the site visit as easy as possible for these members will be our most important task. If no one shows up for the online education that we will be offering, then the Associations affiliated with our site will not be happy and will cancel. We will need to buy, install, and maintain easy to use collaboration and education software. This will include pieces such as Microsoft’s NetMeeting software and Blackboard.com’s educational portal software, as well as e-mail, and instant messaging packages.Behind the scenes we will need redundancy for our serves in the form of High Availability (HA) systems from Sun or other vendors. Uptime is the most important part of offering an online service. If you have bad uptime then people will refuse to revisit your site and you will fail.Almost as important as uptime are backups. If one side of your HA system is going to crash, you need to be able to load a correct, up-to-date backup of th...
