Nov. 3, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Showcasing its Open Computing portfolio and partner solutions at the Educause Conference 2009, Sun Microsystems is reinforcing its position as a leader in open source technologies for the education community. It today announced that Columbia University will use an open source Sun solution to run its digital preservation project, and also that the University of Zurich is deploying Project Wonderland projects to advance an ambitious global eLearning initiative.
Designed to help simplify the implementation of open source technologies and achieve cost-effective interoperability, the Sun Open Computing portfolio includes Sun Open Storage, OpenSolaris™ Operating System, Sun Open Archive solutions and the OpenSPARC™ T1 processor. These technologies, along with partner solutions, are now being demoed at Sun’s booth at the Educause Conference.
Implementing Change at Columbia University Libraries
Columbia University Libraries has selected Sun's Storage Archive Manager (SAM) solution to expand its digital library. The Libraries is combining the SAM management software with Sun servers and storage and tape technologies to enable a coherent and comprehensive technology infrastructure that will ensure the survival and continued accessibility of its vast collection of materials. Columbia's Libraries consists of 22 libraries, with over 10 million volumes, 100,000 current journals and serials, and an extensive collection of electronic resources, microforms and other non-print materials, as well as rare manuscripts and books, some dating to the early 19th century.
“We are at a time of extraordinary technological and social change, when we need to implement systems and services capable of supporting 21st century teaching, learning, research and scholarship. Our goal was to find the right technology vendor to help us build a cost-effective and expandable system to support Columbia’s growing digital collections,” said Robert Cartolano, Director, Library Info Tech Office. “Sun Microsystems provided everything we needed in one place. We were very impressed with their technology model, their commitment to open source and open systems, and their extensive experience in large-scale storage.”
Columbia's integration of the SAM technology, a combination of StorEdge ™ 6140, 4500 and L500 tape storage media technologies, along with Fedora Commons Repository Software from duraspace.org (an open source project) allows it to remotely locate and manage digital artifacts on three tiers of storage in geographically disparate locations for long-term content preservation. The system was designed with the ability to grow to half a petabyte (500,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information.
