SCIENCE

Colorado State University (CSU) has implemented Oracle’s Sun servers and Oracle’s Sun Ray Clients to enhance learning and create an IT infrastructure that is eco-friendly.

CSU’s residence hall, the Academic Village, is an innovative combined residence and learning environment that integrates the classroom into students’ everyday lives, delivering educational services directly to students from a centralized computer facility.

The Academic Village’s computer facility uses Oracle’s Sun Fire x86 clustered systems to deliver maximum computational power for the residence’s engineering students who run Linux- and Oracle Solaris-based programs such as AutoCad, Fluent, Matlab and Pro-Engineer.

Additionally, all Academic Village residents have Sun Ray Clients in their rooms, allowing them to access the servers in the lab for their assignments from a simple, low power consumption thin client. Since all work is done on the server, students can seamlessly shift locations by simply logging into one of the almost 600 Sun Ray Client locations around campus and resuming their sessions with the server. Oracle’s Sun SPARC servers and Oracle Solaris are used to run the Sun Ray Software.

The powerful combination of Oracle Sun servers and Sun Ray Clients provides students with access to a rich learning environment and powerful software they wouldn’t typically have running on their personal computers.

Centralized management using Sun Ray Software and Sun Ray Clients has enabled the CSU IT staff to improve security and drastically reduce system maintenance time by 97 percent for the Academic Village.

Additionally, Oracle’s Sun Ray Clients help support CSU’s commitment to promoting green IT in its datacenter, taking up only half the space and consuming less than 10 percent of the power of a typical PC.

Supporting Quote

“Our philosophy behind the Academic Village is that students are more successful when academics and living are combined,” said Tom Siller, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering at Colorado State University. “The deployment of Oracle’s Sun Servers and Sun Ray Clients has not only allowed us to provide our students with exceptional access to resources that enhance their academic experience, but it has also enabled us to deliver on a key mission of the Academic Village – to build an eco-friendly model that can be expanded and replicated across the campus over time.”