Ackworth School

From Schoolforge-UK

Ackworth School, in Ackworth, West Yorkshire, is a pleasant co-educational independent school with a beautiful Georgian campus.

The pupils are polite and relaxed, and there is an atmosphere of history, with photographs of the school in earlier eras decorating the walls, showing society's changes over the years.

The school was originally a hospital, with G. F. Handel on the board of trustees. Handel's signature can be seen on the bill of sale, which now hangs in the School Library.

David Palmer, the Head of ICT at the school asked us to install a Hypercube application server with a set of thin clients and flat screens.

Each Hypercube System is named after a character FROM Greek history or mythology. The Ackworth system is called Perseus, after the hero who risked being turned to stone conquering the Gorgon Medusa.

Perseus currently sports a single Xeon processor and 1 GB of RAM which gives it the necessary power to run around 10 to 12 concurrent sessions at Ackworth. David plans to upgrade the system to its full spec by adding a second processor and a further 3 GB of RAM to allow him to install thin client workstations across his ICT classroom. (Upgrade now complete).

David explained why he chose Hypercube Systems:

'I wanted a server that would allow me to take some of the LOAD off my existing Citrix servers and expand our network in a way that offered fast, robust service at a price within my budget. The fact that Hypercube were prepared to spend time setting up trial systems to tune the server to our exact needs was a big factor in selecting them for the task. Perseus presently manages the firewall for one of our ADSL lines and FROM September will also manage the other line and load-balance between the two.'

In addition to providing a Linux desktop on the thin clients, with a range of applications including OpenOffice, Mozilla, The Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Scribus and Inkscape, Perseus has been set up to run the Ackworth ICT network. Linux is perfectly suited to network tasks, and Perseus runs a dhcp server, to hand out IP numbers to machines on the network, a web-cache to speed up and control internet access and a domain name server to resolve both local and external network names.