NZ school goes open source: reduces servers required from 4 racks of 48 servers to 4

[thewayne]

Quite amusing. They were able to get this open source school up and running in four weeks! There's some dispute in the comments about whether or not the NZ schools are required to run Windows, still, this sounds like a school that I would have loved to attend.

Just because the racks will hold 48 servers doesn't mean a Microsoft-powered school would require 192 servers, so that comparison is kind of farcical. Still, it will mean a tremendous reduction in power, heat, and noise.

http://www.cio.com.au/article/333686/nz_school_ditches_microsoft_goes_totally_open_source?pp=1

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/01/25/0230231/NZ-School-Goes-Open-Source-Amid-Microsoft-Mandate?art_pos=12

Comments

[silveradept]

I'm impressed. I wonder what all the original extra server requirements would have been for? And whether this school is willing to export their expertise and load sets to any other school that might want to free up some space on their server clusters for more important things, like (pr0n) (stop that, it's a school) more student space.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Some of the feedback said the school would ultimately be upwards of 1300-1500 students, which could definitely require some additional server capacity. With four servers, they're probably not running any redundancy, fail-over or load balancing, but to support 230ish students plus staff currently, they wouldn't need it as bad as with 1500 users. The server rooms are also a standard design, so it's likely the room is overdesigned as using less capacity temporarily is a lot better than having to expand a data center after the rest of the building is in use.

[silveradept]

So they engineered the building with the future in mind. How forward-thinking of them. Still, even running at the 1300-1500 level, I wonder how many fewer servers they would need because of the open-source decision.