Houston, TX — When college students miss a lecture, they typically beg a classmate to borrow the notes, or pray there’s no exam the next day. But at the University of Houston (UH), begging and prayers are no longer necessary: Students simply log onto the university’s Virtual Technology Center’s (VTC), VNet site. There, digitally captured lectures in over 100 courses are streamed within moments of a class meeting. Backed by Xserves and Xserve RAID systems, VNet offers an easy-to-use, one-stop shop for virtually every educational and administrative function required by UH students and faculty.
VTC is a direct descendant of a similar infrastructure developed in 1997 by Salvador Báez-Franceschi, IT director of UH’s College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and project manager for VNet. Báez-Franceschi designed the first incarnation of VNet for the University of Puerto Rico, with a wish to streamline the various tasks performed by faculty and students during the course of a day.
“We wanted to solve most of the problems that students were having with the university’s services,” recalls Báez-Franceschi. “When I came to the U.S. to get my Masters and people started talking about broadband, I realized we really could implement the functionality we’d designed back in Puerto Rico.”
When we compared the price, performance, and ease of use of the Xserves, Apple clearly was the best choice.
— Salvador Báez-Franceschi, IT Director, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Houston
Apple Servers Have Multiple Benefits
The Mac platform wasn’t Báez-Franceschi’s first choice for VNet. But the introduction of Apple Xserves and Xserve RAID systems quickly changed his thinking, for several reasons. “With other servers, we’d had many problems with viruses,” he says. “Plus we have a lot of sensitive student data, so security is a huge thing for us. The Xserves provided fantastic internal security.
