Orwell High School, in Felixstowe on the East Coast of England, is a school with some 1.000 students ranging in age from 11 to 18. The High School introduced open source software in the scope of a hard migration and has just received Specialist School for Technology status through a Government initiative for this project.
Introduction
Funding is never easy for schools in the UK public sector and John Osborne, the Deputy Head of the School responsible for the Specialist School initiative, found himself faced with a difficult situation in early 2004. Funding for hardware was very limited and he couldn\'t contemplate upgrading to Windows XP since he would have to replace some fifty or so PCs with higher-end models just to run the software. A capital cost in the region of € 36.875 (£25.000) was well outside the budget and when he took into account a software licensing spend in the region of €19.175 (£13.000) per year, the Deputy Head became convinced that he had to find a better way of using the school\'s resources.
When John Osborne contacted Andy Trevor, Technical Director Cutter Project, to discuss his cabling and server requirements, an idea arose. Andy Trevor had recently been working closely with Mike Banahan of GBdirect and Open Forum Europe, discussing Open Source implementations in education. Orwell High School was precisely the kind of establishment that would be able to benefit from the range and kind of ICT provision that Andy Trevor and Mike Banahan had been planning.
Starting Point
The school required four classrooms with approximately 30 workstations in each one, distributed printing services and support for a number of smaller clusters of one to five workstations. Furthermore, the school wanted to connect the staff’s laptops to the network via a wireless connection.
The school had specific software requirements for the teaching environment, nearly all of which are met and exceeded by standard Open Source software packages such as OpenOffice.org, MySQL and The Gimp. These have a huge advantage over their proprietary counterparts because the students can also run them at home on their PCs without needing to worry about software licensing.
Some proprietary teaching packages have no direct equivalent in the Open Source world at the moment and some of the teaching packs in use were based on Microsoft software so support for this legacy software was also important.
According to Mike Banahan, main motive of the open source software adoption was to reduce ongoing licensing and management costs. Hardware replacement on a three year cycle had become impossible due to budget constraints.
Migration Process
Andy Trevor, assisted by GBdirect, proposed a low-cost solution that fully met the objectives of Orwell High School at a fraction of the cost of the Windows-based proprietary equivalent. The solution has Linux at its core (currently SuSE Linux 9.1) with a desktop based on KDE kiosk-ised to reduce administrative complexity and cost.
The systems are predominantly FLOSS-based but maintain backwards compatibility with certain software packages by the use of RDP and Windows Terminal Services. All the main teaching activities are supported using FLOSS. The administration system for the school is Windows based and was not part of the project.
Hardware Configuration
Approximately 140 desktop PCs were previously in use. They are recycled as thin clients, supported by 8 IBM blade application servers, each twin Xeon processors with 4GB of memory. Network attached disk storage is provided by two NAS boxes, each with 560GB of disk, half of which is active and the other half mirrors the active partition of the other unit.
A crucial component of the Linux-based solution was a switch to thin-client workstations accessing software running on two central application servers. This allowed all of the existing PC hardware to be re-used without any upgrades. When the PCs boot they no longer use local hard drives, but download copies of the Linux Terminal Server software from a central server instead. Running that software, they become clients for the application servers. Instead of spending significant amounts of money on upgrading the hardware, this has prolonged the life of the workstations by several years at least (and as a consequence also reduces the load on the local landfill site). Since the workstations no longer need hard drives, their power consumption and their noise output is noticeably reduced. As discussed later, the thin-client model also slashes administration effort.
The main servers are IBM blades in a modest configuration consisting of two application servers, one server used for FTP, Web and email, a further server for DHCP and LTSP boot services and a legacy Windows 2003 Terminal Server system which will be retired when the move to Open Source packages has been completed. None of the servers shows any sign of strain even when the full student and staff load is imposed. Despite the school\'s plans to develop a Managed Learning environment over the next year and increase the number of PCs on the network, they will not be considering upgrading their server capacity for some time to come. In addition the space saving layout has provided a significant improvement to the server room.
Software Configuration
Students can log-in to any application server from any workstation when they sign-on, usually picking the most lightly loaded one. All their files are available from any server; if one server needs to be taken down for maintenance the full load of all 120 simultaneous users can still be supported with ease. Examples of the classroom layout and login screen are shown below, demonstrating that the network-boot thin-client is an ordinary PC (click the image for a larger version)
The Linux-based desktop uses a range of standard applications, amongst them OpenOffice.org which provides word processing, a presentation package and a spreadsheet; all of them are able to save and import files in their native XML format whilst retaining compatibility with Microsoft formats. At present closed document formats are mostly still used for compatibility with external data users. It is hoped that a move to more open formats can occur later.
Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer have been replaced by Linux/KDE, OpenOffice.org/Star Office and Firefox. Quanta is used as the HTML editor, the KDE education package provides an assortment of educational software components, Scribus is the desktop publishing package and The Gimp is an excellent image manipulation tool with a wide range of capabilities.
Further used open source software based applications: Inkscape, Nvu, Scribus, MySQL, Apache, Cyrus, Squirrelmail, Postfix, Nagios, Cacti (system monitoring and management), NX for remote desktop access
Whilst between them those meet by far the greatest part of the needs of the students, there is inevitably also a need for access to software that will only run in a Microsoft environment. To provide access to those legacy applications, a server running Microsoft Terminal Server 2003 is used, with the students using a RDP client from the Linux desktop. The students\' files are accessible in both environments. An example of a desktop accessing Visual Basic is shown below. Naturally Windows and Linux screens can be (and are) run simultaneously side-by-side on any of the workstations. The image shows a web browser window running under Linux overlaid with a terminal server session to Windows.
Every student has a personal quota for file space and printer usage. Their personal FTP space is accessible both inside and outside the school and is used to share their files between home and school. There is additional shared FTP space administered by staff, used for setting assignments and sharing background documents. Email is provided to students and staff through Squirrelmail which gives a web interface very similar to Hotmail or Yahoo mail, this too is visible from home as well as from school. The shared-calendar features of Squirrelmail are also proving popular.
Web and email content filtering and caching is provided by an Equinet proxy server and firewall which front-ends the application and terminal server devices. A Quantum Snap storage server with tape backup is shared between both application servers, rendering the choice of application server transparent to the students.
Migration Organisation
According to Mike Banahan, the migration occurred in a \'big bang\'. The new system was installed over the school summer break and began use on the first day of school term following the break. The technical work took about one week to install the systems. Approximately 1,000 students and staff were affected from the migration. Currently some 300 desktop workplaces are in use. The migration is complete, but with new workstations being brought online as budget permits.
The work was done through an external company who provide support. The technology is well understood but technical support and maintenance agreements are important to provide confidence and longevity of the project.
Full support is contracted to The Cutter Project Ltd, but there are a number of other organisations that can support the systems if necessary as the technology is well-understood and proven in similar installations in several other UK schools. The Cutter Project provided commercial packaging and support for the software.
Because of the time available and the urgent need for change the migration was done with very little warning or advance notice to employees. Key staff such as the Head of ICT was involved in the decision making. “If it were to be done again this part of the project would be managed differently,” explained Mike Banahan.
“No training was given. This was not the best part of the project - staff with prepared lesson plans were annoyed that they had to rewrite them, but the students in the establishment rapidly adapted to the use of the Open Source packages,” stated Banahan.
Migration Experiences
Overall the project is considered to be a significant success. Students have adapted to the use of the system with ease and despite being relatively under-prepared for its introduction, staff have also found that the reliability of the system outweighs the limited inconvenience caused by a switch of software components.
The school has experienced a huge increase in availability through the use of this system. Utilisation of the computer rooms has increased from about 50% to 90% as users discover that the systems actually work reliably, and that students are now all able to work individually since we have doubled the number of workstations available to them in each network room. Previously approximately one third of the desktops would be out of use due to software problems such as virus infestation or having been reconfigured by users to a point that rendered them unusable by others. A number of departments have gone as far as to ask for their own network rooms. A business studies suite is nearing completion, and new rooms for science and PSHE/RE will be converted shortly.
This is a real measure of the enthusiasm of staff for the new system.
The school concludes that it is saving of the order of €59.000 (£40.000) per year from a mix of lowered hardware costs, reduced licensing costs and the reduced need for skilled technician support. This is a VERY high figure for such an organisation.
There is a considered cost-benefit analysis available at: http://cutterproject.co.uk/Casestudies/orwell_cost_benefit.php
Evaluation
Overall, the project has been a resounding success. John Osborne said: “I can\'t believe how easy it has been to move to Linux. The systems were installed and working within a week and it has been a revelation how simple and painless the process has been. I have saved thousands of pounds per year and got a brand-new ICT infrastructure at the same time.”
He added:
“Without switching to Linux, I would have been forced to cut back on our ICT hardware and software provision. There simply wasn\'t the budget to upgrade to the latest versions of the software or to keep replacing suites of PCs on a three or four year cycle. Now I have no licensing costs to worry about for the Open Source parts of the solution. We shall be moving to a complete Open Source basis as quickly as is practical and hope to start working with other schools interested in this type of development to share ideas and best practise.”
The students have taken to the new system without any difficulty whatsoever. They much prefer it to the Windows systems they had been using before, commenting particularly on the reliability of the system and one observing that he was astonished to discover, having accidentally switched off his workstation before logging out, that KDE\'s session-restore facility returned him back to where he had been previously when he logged in again.
The overhead of the previous Windows-based classrooms had kept the school\'s ICT technician working twelve hours a day. The new system has greatly reduced this workload. John Osborne said:
“The significant amount of additional work that will arise as a result of our new status would have made his job impossible had we remained with our Windows based network, and we would have been looking to increase our technician staffing to cope. This would have been another significant ongoing cost which we now feel we can avoid. This funding can now be better spent on developing materials for the staff and students to use rather than on keeping the network running”.
He believes a single technician could now administer something between three and five separate schools if they all used systems like those in place at Orwell High School.
“The chosen solution clearly offered substantial cost savings in the future and was the only option for long-term sustainability. (…)The intention is to further reduce the dependency on proprietary software and to extend the number of desktops deployed based on FLOSS,” Mike Banahan said.
John Osborne can initially be contacted by email at john.osborne@orwellhs.suffolk.sch.uk. The school website will also be used to keep interested parties up to date with developments. The school has recently been featured on the BBC "Working Lunch" program. A recording of the program exists as a DVD.
Specialist Schools Initiative
Government Specialist Schools Initiative requires the school to produce a detailed plan to raise standards in Technology, Maths and Science. To help achieve this many schools make extensive use of ICT. The school had to pass a rigorous submission process, and raise at least £50.000 in sponsorship. It has pledged to work with the community and local schools again to help raise standards of education in these specialist areas. In return the Government supplies £100.000 to add to the sponsorship money raised. This is put towards a capital project, which in this case will be to completely overhaul the ICT infrastructure of the school and refurbish the Technology facilities. In addition, each year for at least four years the school receives £129 per pupil per year. This will amount to approximately £500.000 over the four year period. Further details of the scheme can be seen on The Standards website at: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/specialistschools/
Further Information:
Orwell High School
The Cutter Project
Cost-benefit Analysis
Paper Versions of this Case Study
OSS Migration at the Orwell High School (PDF)
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