Bryant University standardizes on Linux

Bryant University in Rhode Island was ranked the the "second most connected campus in America" by the Princeton Review in October 2004. The school offers a wide variety of Web services, including online registration and course materials, a digital buttet library, and a large interconnected campus, and they're all powered by Linux.

Today's common platform is a far cry from the situation a few years ago. "We had a lot of everything and not much of anything," says Art Gloster, Bryant's vice president of information services. "We had a mixture of multiple processors, vendors, and operating systems." The mishmash of different systems combined with inefficient use of server capacities made the IT department's job more difficult. With 74 servers in three locations, sometimes it was a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing.

To provide cutting-edge technology services to its students and faculty, Bryant decided to standardize on Linux. "Our intent was to really concentrate and build a single platform system," says Gloster. "The idea was to consolidate as many servers as we could and move toward using the same operating system." Gloster and his staff knew they wanted to go with an open system that was both economical and secure, and going with Red Hat Linux on IBM hardware was an easy choice. "IBM's announcement about supporting Linux across all its platforms made the decision easier from my point of view," Gloster says.

-- Rich Bell in thread: Things I couldn't do if I switched to Linux I am connected to the Net using a Linksys WRT54G router. I don't get hacked.