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Schools in Minnesota Replace Aging PCs with Thin Clients
Background
 Located in the beautiful bluff country of Southeast Minnesota, Caledonia Area Public School has an enrollment of approximately 950 students. The district boundaries include the Mississippi River on the east and the Iowa border on the south. The other towns in the school district are Brownsville, Eitzen, and Freeburg. Caledonia is located twenty-two miles from La Crosse, Wisconsin that contains all the businesses, cultural and medical facilities of a major metropolitan area. The City of Caledonia is the county seat of Houston County and has a population of 3,000 people.
Business Drivers/Technology Challenge
To provide an up-to-date desktop and e-mail infrastructure, Caledonia Area Public School needed to replace an out-of-warranty desktop system comprised of 300 Compaq computers with an interoperable desktop computing solution that would reduce its maintenance, upgrade, and operational costs. Its existing computers were prone to viruses, required a great deal of maintenance, and would be very expensive to upgrade. In addition, the school needed to upgrade its e-mail software and provide a cost effective replacement for its Microsoft Office Suite.
Solution Overview
 In conjunction with its partner, Open Technologies, Sun provided Caledonia Area Public School with a complete technology infrastructure that met each of its computing challenges. The school's outdated computers were replaced with a desktop computing solution comprised of 60 Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, running Sun Ray Server Software 2.0, powered by three Sun Fire V210 servers. In addition, the school has replaced its Microsoft Office software with Sun's StarOffice productivity suite software, providing the school with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database capabilities. To replace its antiquated e-mail solution, the school deployed the Sun Java System Messaging Server, Sun Java System Calendar Server, and Sun Java System Directory Server, powered by a Sun Fire V240 server. All of the school's IT infrastructure software applications are either currently running, or will be migrating in the near future, to the Sun Solaris Operating System.
Business Benefits
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"Our Sun Ray ultra-thin client and Sun Ray Server Software solution has provided the Caledonia Area Public School with a centralized computing solution that has already saved the school an estimated $24,000 in upgrade costs, $3,000 in anti-virus support, and untold hours in maintenance and administration. Our complete infrastructure from Sun is helping us use cutting-edge technology in a cost-effective, but extremely reliable, manner."
John Lukach,
Director of Technology, Caledonia Area Public School
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Since deploying its Sun Ray ultra-thin clients and Sun Ray Server Software, the school has experienced cost savings, time savings, increased reliability, and ease of maintenance. The decision to replace its existing desktop computers with Sun Ray ultra-thin clients and Sun Ray Server Software has already saved the school an estimated $24,000 in upgrade costs, $3,000 in anti-virus support expenses, and untold hours in maintenance and administration. The school currently plans to increase the number of its Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, and additional servers supporting them, from 60 to 180 in early 2005. In addition, its new Sun Java System Messaging Server, Sun Java System Calendar Server, and Sun Java System Directory Server e-mail solution provide a high-performance, secure messaging platform to support its growing student and staff population. Sun's StarOffice software has also saved on software upgrade costs and enables students to easily transfers documents between their home and school computers.
For more information on Sun Ray thin client technology, visit www.sun.com/sunray,
contact education_news@sun.com or click here to have your local Sun representative contact you.
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