To provide access to technical resources for primary and secondary (K-12) schools, higher education and research institutions, Sun recently announced the Sun Technology and Academic Resources (STAR) initiative. STAR brings together several strategic programs that offer tremendous value to participating institutions and help reduce the cost and complexity of managing network systems for the education IT community.

Sun Academic Initiative

A highlight of the STAR program is the Sun Academic Initiative (SAI). SAI offers academic and research institutions training at no cost. In just over a year, more than 1,350 institutions have saved more than $28 million dollars in training costs.

One of the institutions belonging to the Sun Academic Initiative is the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. "The goal of our department is to give its students an 'advantage' as they progress in their careers," stated Dr. James H. Curry, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Clearly, knowledge of Sun technologies, especially the Java platform and the Solaris Operating Environment, provide such an advantage as they are key elements of leading network computing environments."

Sun Software Programs for Education

Another valuable program within STAR is Sun Software Programs for Education. This comprehensive software offering provides access to Sun's broad range of software technologies with no-cost or low-cost licenses for worldwide education and research individuals and institutions. Over 120,000 software downloads to date have saved participating facilities an estimated $90 million dollars.

Other components of the STAR programs include:

Global Enterprise and Learning Community (GELC)
The GELC is a gathering place for Java-related researchers and educators. It provides a medium for sharing open source educational tools, open learning standards and implementations and open course learning materials.

Sun Centers of Excellence (COE)
COEs, either a physical place on campus or a virtual space on the Internet, provide a unique opportunity to showcase Sun technology in use, demonstrating how such technology can improve learning.

Academic Excellence Grants (AEG)
Sun grants equipment to eligible organizations that have developed creative projects that address our investment priorities and create partnerships for success.

External Research Technology Collaboration (ERO)
Sun started in the academic community and has always fostered a close relationship with researchers in academia, national labs and nonprofit organizations. ERO creates significant technical interactions with the research community.

StarOffice Suite
Sun provides the education community with no-cost licenses for this full-featured office suite that runs on the Solaris OS, Linux and Windows.

"Just over a year ago we purchased Sun servers and an external tape library via the Sun matching grant to use in combination with our Sun EduSoft membership. These programs from Sun have made it possible for us to enhance our real world type 'production lab' by providing our students with hands-on experience in a true UNIX environment that focuses on how to build and maintain a high availability infrastructure," said Todd Goro, LAN administrator at University of Illinois. "Currently we are working with Solaris and Sun Clustering. We believe the experience the students are getting is unique and will benefit their educational experience as well as their future employability. We are very pleased with the opportunities that Sun has made available."

Click here to have your local Sun representative contact you with more information on the STAR initiative, visit http://www.sun.com/edu/programs/star.html, or contact education_news@sun.com