When the Dublin Institute of Technology School of Computing installed its thin client computer lab, the school provided benefits of the new laboratory for students and staff, including low cost, no maintenance devices, energy savings, session mobility and proficiency in UNIX and Windows systems.

The thin clients provide session mobility through the use of a smart card which slots into the device. A lecturer or student may remove the card to leave their disconnected sessions running on various servers and return to them at a later stage without having to shut down or start up a PC. Over 100 students, from 2nd, 3rd and 4th year computing courses, have been using the system on a daily basis for courses in geographical information systems (GIS), system administration, system security and programming.

“The system is particularly good for showcasing GIS applications where images, often in excess of 250 MB in size, are viewed by around 20 students at the same time”, said Mark Foley, lecturer at the School of Computing, DIT. “Normally, if executed on client Windows PCs this would put a huge strain on the network and also the data centre when the data is dispatched from the server across the network. However as all the information resides on the server, the Sun Ray terminals overcome this potential bottleneck and perform head and shoulders above other solutions available.”

The School of Computing has been focused on convincing staff and students to consider using thin client technologies on a daily basis in addition to or as replacements for traditional PCs. The Sun Ray laboratory will provide staff and students with access to the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), Suse Linux and Microsoft Windows. In addition to a student lab of Sun Rays, an increasing number of staff have installed Sun Ray devices as laptop or desktop replacements.

“It is not reasonable to expect computing graduates to be competitive upon entering the workforce if they are not equally competent in using UNIX and Windows systems,” said Mark Deegan, lecturer at the DIT School of Computing. “We must present students with equal opportunity to develop desktop and system administration skills on both Windows and Unix systems.”

Blogger Damien Farnham mentions another development at the Dublin Institute, which involves the use of the Solaris 10 OS in teaching the Windows/Linux/Solaris operating systems. The school has had Solaris 10 OS installed, configured Samba, ZFS, Containers, Linux Containers and the Java Enterprise System in addition to the Windows Terminal Server, which enables lecturers to use the lab to teach on Windows, Linux and Solaris from the same lab. [...read more...]

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