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Universities Rely on Sun Open Source Technologies Solutions Offer Support for 21st Century Teaching, Learning, Research
Columbia University will use an open source Sun solution to run its digital preservation project, and the University of Zurich is deploying Project Wonderland projects to advance a global eLearning initiative. The Sun Open Computing portfolio includes Sun OpenStorage, OpenSolaris, Sun Open Archive solutions and the OpenSPARC T1 processor. Columbia University's Digital Library
Columbia University Libraries consists of 22 libraries, with over 10 million volumes, 100,000 current journals and serials, and an extensive collection of electronic resources, microforms and other non-print materials, as well as rare manuscripts and books. Columbia will be relying on Sun's Storage Archive Manager (SAM) solution to expand its digital library. The SAM technology is a combination of Sun StorEdge 6140, 4500 and L500 tape storage media technologies, along with Fedora Commons Repository Software from duraspace.org - an open source project. This solution will allow Columbia to remotely locate and manage digital artifacts on three tiers of storage in geographically disparate locations for long-term content preservation. The system was designed with the ability to grow to half a petabyte (500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information. "We are at a time of extraordinary technological and social change, which we need to implement systems and services capable of supporting 21st century teaching, learning, research and scholarship. Our goal was to find the right technology vendor to help us build a cost-effective and expandable system to support Columbia's growing digital collections," said Robert Cartolano, Director, Library Info Tech Office. "Sun Microsystems provided everything we needed in one place. We were very impressed with their technology model, their commitment to open source and open systems, and their extensive experience in large-scale storage." University of Zurich's ShanghAI Lectures
The University of Zurich's ShanghAI Lectures on embodied intelligence are being broadcast by videoconference from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai to universities across the planet, complemented by 3D collaborative virtual environments and other community-building activities to promote interaction and cooperation among the participants. The lecture series began on October 15 and runs until December 17, 2009. Sun and Virtual Learning Labs provided consultancy on the use of Project Wonderland to support the ShanghAI events, and also, together with a number of teams from various institutions (including the universities of Zurich, Lugano, and Bern) and companies, such as Munich-based architect Henn Architekten, designed and implemented the ShanghAI Lectures 3D world. "We used the open source Project Wonderland toolkit to develop a virtual 3D environment, and it has proven to be ideal for our purposes," said Professor Rolf Pfeifer, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich. "Students and faculty from almost 40 universities worldwide are now able to meet and mingle in our virtual classroom and share cutting-edge research on natural and artificial intelligence through our virtual classroom." The University of Zurich is a member of the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group--a Sun Microsystems Inc.-sponsored community dedicated to advancing the state of open source technology and content for virtual worlds and gaming in education based on Sun's open source Project Wonderland, Project Darkstar and SunSPOT technologies. This group is open to institutions, commercial organizations, faculty and students interested in working with Sun, in learning and in sharing practical experiences in new 3-D Web environments. More Information
Sun's Free and Open Source Software Education: What's New and Recently Updated - Sun's BigAdmin
Sun in the Education Industry
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we need to implement systems and services capable of supporting 21st century teaching, learning, research and scholarship 
Universities Rely on Sun Open Source Technologies
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