Hi Celia,
I cooked up a plan 5 years ago to save the University £250k pa (13 000 FTEs)
by switching campus to Sun's Sunray. It depended on switching campus away
from Microsoft Office to using OpenOffice, but it never saw the light of day
because it was felt that some of our staff were too resistant to change
regardless of how much it would save. there's a small chance we might
revisit it as we move to more web-based services, like Google Apps. Changing
culture is hard. A smaller institution could make it work, but wouldn't see
that size of savings.
The Sunray unit runs on just 4 watts and has no fan which is quiet and saves
on energy even taking into consideration of that you need a server for every
few hundred Sunrays. Most of the savings come from dropping the Microsoft
Windows and Office licences and not having to replace PCs. The few bits of
software that absolutely need to run on Windows can be handled by Windows
Terminal Services. I figured that you could get department buy-in by
splitting the savings with the departments that take it up.
Ask yourself which would make you more productive, an extra lecturer in
_your_ department, lightening the teaching load ... or MS Office whose
interface changes every 5 years and can't read old documents?
One problem I hadn't looked at was how to handle CD/DVD, but there are USB
drives that might solve that. Sun is now owned by Oracle, so my research is
out of date. Drop me an email if you want to discuss the assumptions I made.
Try contacting Bishop Grosseteste University College in Lincoln. I heard
they're using Sunrays, but bizarrely are running Windows XP on them. It's a
bit like buying a super car to pull a 40ft trailer and wondering why it
doesn't like climbing hills. They report problems with some types of memory
stick, but I wonder if this is just down to XP.
best of luck,
--
Boyd Duffee Keele University (01782) 734225
Student Facing Systems
"Making the hard decisions" is just a cliche excuse people use
to justify doing the unthinkable - idontgno
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