paper -
14 Open Source Software and Linux in the Academic Enterprise
Mike
Davis, Virginia Commonwealth University
John Fritz, Virginia Commonwealth University
Carlisle Childress, Virginia Commonwealth University
Will O'Donovan, Virginia Commonwealth University
Open Source Software (OSS) has made great strides
toward mainstream acceptance over the past two years. However, many IT managers, both in business and academia, are
still cautious about OSS. Is it reliable?
Is there support? Will it last? Linux has further complicated the issue
not only because its operating system is OSS, but because it runs on inexpensive
commodity hardware. Often IT managers are hesitant to move from long-trusted
proprietary hardware and software and trust major projects to OSS and commodity
hardware.
Past SIGUCCS presentations by Virginia Commonwealth
University have detailed our use of standards based email and directory
services to replace legacy systems. That email migration put us on a path
toward the implementation of a variety of Open Source Software and commodity
hardware solutions.
In 1997, the primary Open Source Software in use on
our campus was Perl. In the past three
years, we have implemented OSS solutions for email, webserving, webmail,
software development, directory services, and database development. While implementing OSS we have also begun to
implement commodity hardware solutions running the Linux Operating System in
those areas where it provides benefits. While Linux webservers have become the
norm, we have brought other Linux based machines online for directory services,
webmail, and research. Recently, we investigated, benchmarked and purchased a
Beowulf Linux cluster to significantly expand our ability to significantly
expand our ability to provide resources for our computationally intensive
research.
Open Source Software and the Linux operating system provide two very important tools to allow universities to leverage skilled and trained staffs to meet user needs and expectations in a highly cost effective manner without sacrificing quality of service. This paper will examine VCU's transition from proprietary hardware and software solutions to OSS and commodity hardware. It will focus on selection criteria, testing methods, implementation, and the evaluation process as well as the "selling" of OSS and commodity hardware to IT managers.