Indiana University’s Adobe Debacle

This past week saw a groundbreaking agreement between Adobe and Indiana University, providing their professional level software at no cost to students and faculty enrolled or employed by IU or IUPUI. Adobe’s agreement is the first with any major university, with an emphasis, obviously, on educating the collegiate crowd about their products.

adobeiu

Earlier this week, every student and faculty member logged into OnCourse and was greeted by this picture. Earlier this week, IUware crashed.

For all its technological advances, IU was seemingly oblivious as to the effect that this announcement would have on its distribution servers. The brains behind the agreement did not plan for nearly everyone who had even an inkling of design interest to log on at the exact same time to try and download their product or suite of choice. They took some steps; the installation had been broken into a number of ~500MB chunks. The problem lies in the lack of a download speed cap. Thousands of people were logging in and the server(s) was pumping out installation chunks at speeds upwards of 500Kbps. The result? The site became essentially useless. Navigation, login, and access to the downloads themselves were extremely slow, and often resulted in a “Service Interrupted” screen.

Earlier today UITS introduced a cap on the downloads, peaking around 40-45Kbps. While mind-nubingly slow (and it stays just as slow when wired, on-campus), this assures the site itself can stay speedy, and give everyone fair access to the new software.

All of that said, I could not be more excited about what this means for Indiana University. This agreement has garnered massive amounts of attention to a university with a well-respected media arts and telecommunications schools, as well as an on-the-rise Informatics program. Although no details were released how Adobe is monetarily benefitting from this deal, the inception of the Adobe Education Enterprise License Agreement (Adobe EELA) is truly grounbreaking. I am excited to see what kind of corporate attention this will bring, potentially leading companies like Sony, Apple, Canon, and others to develop pilot education programs right here in Bloomington.

In the meantime, I’ll be downloading CS4 Production Premium 500MB at a time! Sarcasm aside, I am super excited to play around with Premiere, After Effects, and the new Photoshop.

UITS Article

UPDATE: UITS seems to have gotten it’s stuff together, and on campus I’m holding steady at ~215Kbps, and the site is just as speedy.