Rookwood, 4th Floor
The men's basketball team at Butler University captured the hearts and imagination of sports fans around the world as it progressed to the championship game of the 2010 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. Behind the scenes, a dedicated group of IT professionals working at the University watched the traffic to their main public website grow from 10,000 visits per day to almost 140,000 visits per day. While the basketball team dominated the hoops on the basketball court, this group of individuals jumped through hoops of their own, working around the clock to monitor and modify network traffic to accommodate the flood of traffic to Butler's website after the team won the Sweet Sixteen. Moving swiftly to react to the trend, this team utilized multiple tactics to prepare for the overwhelming amount of attention they would receive. Combining virtual servers, traffic manager technology, a combination of static HTML and CMS, redundant database servers and a few other tricks, the team was able to improve capacity with each win and be ready for the final flood of traffic during the Final Four and final game.
Sheila Shidnia joined Butler University as Director of Web Marketing and Communications in 2008. She previously worked as the Director of Products and Services for WiseElephant, a marketing company she co-founded in 2003. Sheila's past experience includes positions in publicity and promotions for Capitol Records, Polygram, and Alligator Records. She also served as a Senior A&R Administrator at Sony BMG Music Entertainment. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Asheville where she studied sound design with Dr. Robert Moog. Twitter: @sheilashidnia