Oxfordshire County switches on Linux

OXFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL has nearly finished its roll out of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System x and IBM BladeCenter systems across more than 282 schools.

The system aims to deliver local web caching within the County's schools system, to improve response times on the 'safe schools' Internet.

The system is based around two Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and two Intel-based IBM System x servers at each secondary school and a single server at each primary school. It will mean that there are 426 Academic servers with provisioning modules and one Red Hat Satellite Server. Each school will have tiered access to the county council's high-speed internet connection, via a central cache.

According to the press release, one of the main reasons Oxfordshire opted for Linux was the cost, but it was also pleased about how stable, secure and reliable enterprise-class Linux was too. Of course in my day we had 10 Commodore Pets wired up in series to one floppy and thought ourselves lucky.

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