Solaris an Open platform for Colleges.

One of the engineers in my team recently attended his graduation and got talking to his ex lecturer ( Mark Deegan ). The topic turned to Sun and Solaris and the faith of their old SunRay lab. The lab was not heavily used and Mark asked if we could help bring it up to date.

A number of the Performance team visited and installed Solaris 10
and configured Samba, ZFS , Containers, Linux Containers , Java
Enterprise Systems etc. and Mark and his team added some Windows Terminal Server so now any lecturer can use the lab to teach on Windows, Linux and Solaris from the same lab.

All platforms can share the same ZFS storage on the new T1000s they bought and backed up using the cool snapshot feature.
Mark was shocked to see what you get for your money ! 

I cannot say how annoyed I get when I read so many stories about Sun that start with Sun Microsystems the maker of "expensive propriety systems", this is a myth, we're open, just check, you get a lot of your dollar, euro , pound and college pricing is even better. I just love people face when you type psrinfo -v on a T1000 32 threads in a 1U.

The lab has all years old SunRay advantages, quieter ( no fans )
use less power ( the SunRay draw a fraction of the power of a PC ) and the T1000 draw a fraction your Dell. Everyone seems to be fighting to claim they are the greenest but this is old hat for us.


DIT have also started hosting Irish OpenSolaris user groups http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/ie-osug/meetings/14/

DIT have also signed up for the Sun's FREE online educational training program which covers, Solaris, Java, Java Enterprise System and even soft skills like time management.  Queen's
in Belfast are also members.

There is a news artical which covers what DIT are doing here.