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North West Catholic School Division 16 |
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NWCSD #16, located in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, came into
existince in 1997 with the initial amalgamation of three different
school boards. A fourth school board joined in 2003, increasing the
total number of schools in the NWCSD #16 to eight, with more than 1,300
students.
Situation
NWCSD #16 had a state-of-the-art thin client system from Sun
Microsystems. The proprietary Sun thin clients and servers worked
well, but maintenance costs were too high. In addition, many of
the applications the school board wished to use in the schools were
Linux based, open source programs. The IT department was
investing much of its time trying to get the Linux applications working
on the Sun operating system.
With the hardware ageing and warranties beginning to expire, the school
board was concerned with purchasing expensive replacement hardware and
software available only from Sun.
Solution
Systems Aligned was asked to produce a proposal for a Linux thin client
solution, and stunned the school board with a total cost more than 50%
lower than the estimate for a Microsoft Windows desktop/server solution
(which the NWCSD #16 had conducted a study of independently).
Operating and maintenace costs were also substantially lower than for
the Windows desktops.
Systems Aligned implemented Linux thin client technology based on the
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). 122 Sun Rays and four Sun
servers were replaced with true thin clients and servers from Symbio
Technologies. The Symbiont Management Suite and CodeWeavers
CrossOver Plugin were deployed to greatly simplify management of the
thin clients and to integrate the Shockwave plugin with the Firefox web
browser.
NWCSD #16 is now moving towards replacing the remaining 600+ Sun Rays
and multiple Sun servers with an end-to-end Linux thin client system.
Results
- Rapid deployment: thin clients and servers installed and running within two days
- Maintenance costs significantly lowered by moving to commodity hardware
- Vendor lock-in eliminated
- Savings of $400 per workstations over the previous Sun system
- Able to maintain a student to computer ratio of 2:1
- Simplified, more powerful management
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