Uni slashes desktop support demands

When Edith Cowan University's communications school switched to Mac OS X for its desktop and server hardware system support demands fell, according to its IT manager Steven Doyle.

Last year the school of communications and multimedia at the Perth-based university was faced with stability and management issues associated with Mac OS 9 so decided to migrate some 280 screens to OS X 10.3 Panther.

“We went to OS 9 four years ago but try to stick with a three-year technology rotation cycle,” Doyle said. “Our teaching machines are a mixture of iMacs, G4s, and the new G5s which isn’t a bad thing as OS X will boot of all machines regardless of type.”

The school, which has about 2500 students a year with each is allocated 750MB of storage space, recently took delivery of 60 PowerMac G5 machines.

“The desktops support roaming profiles and directory access which works well,” Doyle said. “OS X stores everything on the servers and only writes locally when it needs to so there is no local caching. Also, each client allows secure logins via SSL which addresses one of the concerns universities face.”

Although Doyle described the school’s IT operations as “autonomous”, he said relying on the university’s network and Active Directory system is necessary.

“We operate a centralised OpenLDAP server for directory access which is easier to support than the main Active Directory server as we can control it,” Doyle said. “The university is moving to a new single sign-on system and OS X allows us to connect to this.” Without being able to put a specific figure on the cost savings, Doyle said the centralised desktop management means the IT staff's time is put to better use.

“In our department we manage some 300 desktops with two full-time and one part-time employee,” he said. “As a comparison, another department has about 500 Windows desktops and they employ 15 staff. This particular department previously used cheap Windows boxes, but has now moved to IBM because of the support costs.”

Doyle is happy that the “Apple stack” of hardware to applications won’t lock the department into a proprietary solution. “Previously you reached a point where you could go no further with Apple, but now all types of applications can be written on the Mac,” he said. “Now we are looking at Xgrid for distributed rendering.”

On the server side, the school has 20 servers running OS X, including five Xserve G4s.

“We have ordered five Xserver G5s and a new Xserve RAID storage system which we need with the number of users and applications we run simultaneously,” Doyle said. “The new servers will be coming in March; however, it is a constant frustration with Apple getting its new products supplied when they are released.”

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