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Enterprise class infrastructure in a school environment
"Students should benefit from the same infrastructure and computing resources that are provided to employees by today's enterprise organizations" says Michael Clark, IT Consultant to Overseas Family School. Designing a school IT platform to provide students, teachers, administrators and staff with the same tools as a modern corporation has provided the "challenge of a lifetime" for Clark.
Students at OFS regularly roam from computer to computer with their files and email following them around the school, with seamless access from the Macintosh, Windows and Linux operating systems.
Each student has his or her own unified login id and password that will get them onto the school extranet, web-mail system and file server. This is backed by an LDAP directory server. They have remote access from home so they can download their latest homework assignment or show parents their current school project stored on their personal web site.
The system includes a high-availability, fault-tolerant Linux cluster located in an environmentally-controlled server room even has two power feeds and a back-up air-conditioning system. This reduces downtime letting staff and students focus on the task at hand without technology problems getting in the way.
A Gigabit (1 billion bits per second or 10 times faster than the average company LAN) network spanning the school's 11 buildings provides the bandwidth needed for network intensive applications such as sharing video files or using the net-boot technology that allows the school to easily administer its desktops.
To provide an unequaled level of data security for the school, student and staff files and email are stored on a Fibre Channel SAN (Storage Area Network) and are backed up nightly to a 1 terabyte robot tape library that is geographically diverse (located in another building) via the school's fibre optic network.
Clark says this has all been put together on a reasonable budget because of the use of the Linux operating system and free open-source software. "What we've saved on software we've invested in a high-quality server platform."
The school uses open-source software packages plus its own internally-developed software, to provide a completely integrated learning collaboration environment. For example, the IMAP mail server is the same as the one developed and used internally at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., which has invested $US50 million in interactive IT to "get rid of boring lectures".
On second thoughts, I think they have a better system than most corporations.
