I was thinking about the changing tides in software buying trends and how these changes can be such a huge win for education. Education professionals have always known the value of collaboration and sharing of ideas. It just took the technology industry a bit of time to catch up. The good news is it is happening. The days of expensive, proprietary software packages are ending. The new way of collaborative, standards-based open source technology is here. And with it comes, more development, more innovation yet for less money and much easier.

All IT professionals, especially those in education are being asked to do a lot:
? Do more with less
? Lower risk and achieving greater interoperability
? Ability to access more advanced, better quality technology
? And meeting compliance requirements

Sun and its open source partners offer a number of solutions designed specifically for the needs of educational institutions. Sun Open Network Systems offer open data storage, which leverages standard technology that enables IT departments to mix and match components from different providers. Sun also offers its Open Solaris operating system as well as Open Archive, a cost-effective, scalable, sustainable infrastructure for storing one of an educational institution?s most valuable assets?its data.

Additionally, there are some excellent ISVs offering open source applications to help education IT professionals achieve these lofty goals.
? Kuali/rSmart offers a platform solution for financials and administrative needs
? Moodle provides a learning management platform
? Sage provides a math platform solution for both SPARC and Intel
? MySQL and PostgreSQL offer open source database solutions

These technology solutions are real and working today.

I previously wrote about Bradford schools in southern England who are using open source software from Sun and others like Moodlerooms.

The Mission Heights New Zealand school has deployed SunRays and only open source software for the classrooms.

Another example is, the Roman Catholic diocese of Boise, Idaho who were looking for a cost effective software/storage solution to preserve their historical records, student information, employee data, and their financials. The organization needed to increase their capacity, minimize their costs and simplify the management and administration while increasing their server utilization.

They ultimately chose a Sun Open Storage solution built on OpenSolaris and two Sun Fire X4500 servers. The diocese IT group installed one Sun Fire X4500 server and used Solaris ZFS in OpenSolaris to configure each drive as an iSCSI target in a virtual storage pool. The whole process took about 15 ? 20 minutes.

Today, not only does the diocese now have the power and 24 terabyte of storage to enable new projects, but it is also saving money.


These are just a few of the examples of how open computing is a game-changer for education and how we can change how education is designed, delivered and supported...together.











More...