At any given moment at Indiana University Bloomington, there can be up to 200,000 devices on its network at once. That’s factoring in devices across other campuses and remote learners, as the university beefs up its networking architecture to serve virtual courses across the globe and to improve accessibility for learners with disabilities. For networking services at the edge, where student laptops and smartphones live, Indiana University turns to the Citrix Systems Inc. platform.    

“We always continually try to reduce the barriers of entry and access,” said Matt Link (pictured, right), associate vice president of research technologies at IU. “With supercomputing, before, you had to be this tall to ride this ride. Well, now we’re down to here and with the hopes that will get down even farther. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken virtualized desktop, put it in front of the supercomputers, and now you can be wherever you want to be and have access to [high-performance computing] at IU.”

IU won Citrix’s 2019 Innovation Award last week for its two accessibility tech projects that help students with disabilities.

Link and Stephanie Cox (pictured, left), manager of application and desktop virtualization services at IU, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) during the Citrix Synergy event in Atlanta, Georgia. They discussed how IU is ensuring that education is open and accessible to students worldwide (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Martin: Talk to us a little bit about Indiana University. This is a big, big organization. Lots of folks accessing the network through lots of devices. Give us that picture of what’s going on there.

Link: IU is about 130,000 students across seven campuses. We’ve got about 20,000 faculty and staff across those seven campuses. One of the things that makes us a little unique is we’re a consolidated IT shop. There are 1,200 of us at IU that support the entire university and all the campuses, and at any one point in time, there could be 200,000 devices touching the network and using those services.

Townsend: From Indianapolis to Chicago is just a lot of rural area, and I’m sure part of your mission is to make sure technology and education is accessible to everyone in Indiana. Talk to us about the challenges of getting connectivity and getting virtual classrooms to those remote areas.

Cox: It’s really one of the major strengths of our partnership with Citrix. They are really the premier remote solution connectivity offering at Indiana University. So we built our Citrix environment to encompass everyone. We wanted to make sure we could have enough licenses and capacity for all of our 130,000 faculty staff and students to use the service. Do they all show up at the same time? No, thank goodness. But we do offer it to everyone, which I found is very unique to Indiana University.

It’s another thing to have consolidated IT and then to be able to offer a service like ours to everyone and not just restrict it to specific pockets of the university. With that, we’ve been able to then extend offering of any application or something that you might need for a class to any of our other remote locations. So if you’re a student who is working or lives in rural Indiana and you want to get an Indiana University degree, you can do that without having to travel to one of our campus sites or locations. We have a very nice online program and just a lot of other options that we’ve really tried to offer for remote access.

Martin: What is AT?

Cox: Accessible technology. One of the things that I think is just a wonderful thing about working at a university is we’re able to buy software licenses in a large quantity because we have that kind of buying power. So with that, when we started looking at all of the different applications that they could buy in a large quantity site license, in a way we thought, let’s virtualize these and make sure everybody gets access to them.

The ones that were really attractive to us were the ones for the visually impaired. Sure they’re niche and they’re very expensive, but let’s just try to see how well they perform in a virtual environment. And with our Citrix infrastructure underneath, they performed quite well. Plus, the apps have evolved a great deal over just the last four years. We’re really proud to offer our virtual desktop to our blind students. To work with those students, to learn more about their needs, to learn more about the different applications that people write for people with all disabilities — I hope we can do more in that space.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Citrix Synergy event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Citrix Synergy 2019. Neither Citrix Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE