The University of Rochester has a substantial Web presence with over 140 Web servers operating on our network and over 40 off-campus servers operating on commercial networks.
The largest repository of Web pages is the central Web server, which hosts the main University site (www.rochester.edu) and 24 other sites with nearly 200,000 static pages plus significant dynamic content.
The main Web site’s traffic level is currently around 1 million page requests per week, with a recent peak of 1.4 million. Last year this one server responded to nearly 55 million requests serving 1.3 trillion bytes of information to over two million individuals in as remote locations as Ascension Island. Recent log reports show that just over one-quarter of our Web traffic to the main University site comes from internal users. The second largest domain is the Medical Center site (www.urmc.rochester.edu) with another 180,000 pages with traffic at 700,000 page requests per week or 36.4 million page request per year.
Over the last seven years, Web traffic has grown almost ten fold. The upward trend is clearly continuing as more of the University’s business transactions are Web-enabled.
Principal areas of Web content include student recruitment, academic materials for each of the University’s six schools, and Web interfaces to systems such as student records, course registration, payment systems, human resource management, phone and email directories, and event calendars. Much of the University’s business is conducted via our Web sites.
The central servers are considered “mission critical” to the University. Plans are being implemented to insure that the servers’ “uptime” is as close to 100 percent as possible.
We have great diversity of server technology in both hardware and software. Units run every available server software product on every available platform using many different software and application server configurations and databases.
The University Web network extends well beyond the University’s official public Web sites. Our network contains nearly 2,000 devices that are Web enabled. Many staff and students have small Web sites running on personal computers, and much of our network is managed via these Web-enabled devices.
There are more than 1,200 Web publishers in the various units of the University using a variety of Web editing software. These publishers are directly supported by more than 20 support staff. All Web support units report ever increasing demand for services.
The University Web Group
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