changes. www.TechnicalPDF.com Xavier is in the process of continuing the push to the cloud for the combined entity. Incompatibility between browsers, computers, and applications is another area where the school is working toward standardization and compatibility. Not all of cloud and hosted applications are compatible with every browser used at the school. The university would like to see more standardization in browsers SO that cloud and hosted applications work more smoothly and can be tested with just a single browser. In addition to these differences, some staff and faculty have PCs and others have Mac computers. Currently the IT department feels that none of the systems scale, adequately to support both universities. They are not designed to be functioning globally, across time zones. The university is now working to align all of these incompatibilities and limits. Xavier predicts that this will be a 3-year process. Monitoring LANs-What's Up? What's Down? To properly operate large networks, a good suite of management tools is required. Moreover, because problems can occur in switches, servers, and storage, the best management suites are those that are capable of diagnosing and viewing all of these devices. Visibility across these three sectors is complicated by the fact that in many data centers, different manufacturers supply the switches, servers, and storage. One solution is to use third-party suites of management software that are capable of monitoring equipment supplied by more than one manufacturer. The purpose of monitoring software is to notify IT staff about the status of LAN infrastructure. For example, are there outages? Where are the outages? Is congestion delaying traffic? Monitoring software is important on local area networks because LANs and data centers are critical to the functioning of today's www.TechnicalPDF.com organizations. Companies deploy monitoring software to alert them to outages and provide reports and charts on the percentage of outages and congestion on, for example, switch po