Part I: Hunter College goes back to school with Macs, OS X, Xserve

By Yuval Kossovsky

January 9, 2003 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Although Apple Computer Inc. often takes a back seat to more Windows- and Linux-centric hardware back ends at most companies, the company's new Xserve server has been gaining attention in the enterprise space since its introduction last year. One place where the Xserve and other pieces of Apple hardware and software are being integrated is Hunter College, the flagship school for the City University of New York.
The man shepherding the move is Yuval Kossovsky, manager of digital media systems for the school's Department of Film and Media Studies. Kossovsky, who holds a master's degree in telecommunications management and is an Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, has agreed to spell out how the school moved from Mac OS 9 to the new Mac OS X last summer and to discuss its plans to install an Xserve server. In a series of monthly articles for Computerworld, he will lay out what the school hopes to achieve, how the project is going, as well as what works and what doesn't. This is the first in the series, outlining some of the early problems.


Apple Computer Xserve

Through fund-raising efforts by Hunter College President Jennifer Raab, the school is allocating upwards of $1 million to upgrade its film and media labs to provide back-end support for a new master of fine arts (MFA) program in integrated media arts and its undergraduate studies.
The goal is to move our labs into a modern configuration with Gigabit Ethernet, fiber-optic backbone, a lab-based network-attached storage (NAS) system, a storage-area network, a digital theater for viewing, a media digitizing and cataloging center and an Internet/intranet broadcast system. These changes will give each graduate and undergraduate student an individual account for the duration of his studies and enable our MFA students to easily move their work from production to presentation over the public Web or in the new digital screening room.
Our media production process will now provide the services and speed of an enterprise environment. For example, initial tests show that we can move 1GB of video from desktop to server in 1 minute and 15 seconds during peak usage. Before the school's conversion to Mac OS X, the same file-copy procedure took more than an hour.
The first phase of the project consisted of migrating all of the client desktops (45 seats and five servers) from OS 9 to OS X (Version 10.1.5) and upgrading the AppleShare 6 server to OS X. That milestone move was modified before the start of the 2002 fall semester to include deployment

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