Super Storage with Xserve

Such ease of use isn’t limited to Berklee’s students and staff. Mash says faculty members also benefit from the five Xserves located on campus. Each Xserve offers 2.5 mirrored terabytes of storage, thus providing a full 5 terabytes of space for music files, lesson plans, and more. Using Mac OS X Server’s support for network home directories, the faculty can create directories that give them the freedom to work anywhere on the Berklee campus they desire. This is especially important in a studio-based environment.

“Faculty members can log in and get their desktop and files from any computer, just as if it were their own,” explains Mash. “This way, their storage needs — even for big audio files — are easily met. Students can drop their homework assignments into their teachers’ public folders, and it’s no problem. Now we’re looking at Xsan to expand our storage capabilities, especially in the area of film scoring.”

Laptops Support Student Communication

How has student life changed since the advent of the PowerBook pervasive computing initiative at Berklee? Mash says the use of the laptops has seeped into virtually every aspect. “The overall excitement level about the laptops is extremely high,” he confirms. “Among students who are living on campus, iChat is a huge part of the dorm experience. All sorts of things are happening that we just didn’t anticipate, especially in the area of communication.

“This is very important because the music profession is a field that’s based on communications,” continues Mash. “Our students will be making music and distributing it online, and they’ll be promoting themselves online. So it’s really important that they get this experience while they’re still students.”

We created a master image and put it on the Xserve, which let us configure multiple machines at the same time. Using this approach it takes about seven minutes per machine, something that used to take hours by hand.

— David Mash

More than anything, Mash points to the musically inclined students’ eager adoption of iTunes as proof of the value of the Mac laptops. “What’s really caught my eye is their use of iTunes as a really large, anarchistic radio station,” he laughs. “Because our whole campus is wireless, students are making music and saving the files as MP3s, then opening them up in iTunes and sharing their personal music libraries over the wireless network.