Kingston University announces virtualisation plans
Kingston University announces virtualisation plans
A major IT upheaval has been announced by Kingston University, a higher education establishment located near London.
The project is the first of its kind on this scale within the UK education sector and will see Kingston virtualise its entire base of PCs as it prepares for “life without the desktop”.
Making the change will be no small feat, with substantial numbers of staff and students requiring access. At the moment there are around 7,000 PCs supported for staff and students on the university's four campuses as well as at its additional satellite offices.
The majority of the services are Windows XP systems, but around 1,000 systems are designed to dual boot with Apple's OS X. As the virtualised systems are introduced, this will move towards an eclectic mixture of fully-thin clients as well as app virtualisation and the integration of older systems.
Daniel Bolton, one of the project architects, told Computer World: “One of the goals is to embrace the consumerisation of IT. We can’t force the students to sit down in front of an ugly PC anymore.”
He added that the university is increasingly switching towards offering a service on demand, rather than attempting to use out of data hardware and systems to deliver a service to today's increasingly demanding students.
In practice, this means that more people will be able to access the system from their own devices and less pressure will be put on the university's PCs to cater to everyone's needs, so the queues for using the computers around the campus are likely to diminish.
However, the new arrangement looks likely to be demanding on the network and before the launch of the project in the first quarter of 2012, the university could be looking into options such as managed networks and leased lines to ensure that it is up to handling the change in traffic.
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