South China Normal University Takes Teaching to the Next Level with Red Hat

Founded in 1933, South China Normal University is a prestigious university in Guangdong Province, China. Spread over three campuses — Guangzhou Shipai, Guangzhou University City and Nanhai — the university offers a wide range of bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate programs. The University uses technology to give students an enriched learning experience. Computer-aided teaching and learning are widely adopted and used in its courses.

Leveraging IT to boost education

As a leading educational institution, South China Normal University wanted to accelerate its information technology use to an advanced level. South China Normal University’s next phase of IT in education focuses on deepening the use of IT in teaching. It encompasses web-based teaching platforms and hopes to expand the use of teaching applications.

South China Normal University sought to progress through three different phases. The first phase was to utilize computers to assist teaching, the second to use computers to assist learning, and the third being the integration of IT and university courses. “IT in education is entering the third phase — utilizing IT to create an ideal learning environment, providing whole new learning and teaching approach and changing traditional teaching structure and education dramatically,” said Ye Huiwen, director of South China Normal University’s Education Information Center.

Open source technologies bring greater value

South China Normal University began looking for a virtualization solution because it wanted to leverage existing servers, while minimizing additional hardware investment.

The move aimed to save costs by replacing and consolidating older servers, increase IT service agility through load balancing and rapid server provisioning and improve system recovery, business continuity and high availability.

The university’s preferred solution provider needed to be open source-based, have a single vendor supporting the operating system and virtualization stack, and have timely on-site engineer service support.

Various solutions were considered during the proof-of-concept. However, after extensive evaluation and consideration, South China Normal University selected Red Hat® Enterprise Virtualization as their trusted solution.

“Red Hat is optimal for our software environment and allows for the development of other applications on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on demand,” said Ye.

New deployment runs host of applications

The university’s new deployment comprises Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Web Server, and Red Hat Linux Virtual Servers running on HP blade servers. The new system involved a migration to a new physical server running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on 8 sockets.

The host of virtualized applications include the university’s course center, the center’s website, mobile learning platform, selected courses, facility room management, accounting center, live system platform, and main teaching directory server.
 

New deployment runs host of applications

The university’s new deployment comprises Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Web Server, and Red Hat Linux Virtual Servers running on HP blade servers. The new system involved a migration to a new physical server running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on 8 sockets.

The host of virtualized applications include the university’s course center, the center’s website, mobile learning platform, selected courses, facility room management, accounting center, live system platform, and main teaching directory server.

Teaching methods excel

With kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology from Red Hat, the IT-based teaching and learning system has been implemented across applications and platforms. The migration has not only optimized the supporting system, but also increased server and IT resource utilization.

Virtualization has also enabled South China Normal University to lower operational costs, with significant savings in both human and financial resources.

System stability and reliability have improved and the IT architecture is now more flexible and agile, enabling the university to adapt to changing needs quickly. As the number of teaching and learning applications increase, more students depend on e-learnings. This progression consequently leads to the requirement of more teaching and learning IT resources within the classroom.

“As cloud computing technology is more widely used, such system applications will be used more broadly to drive the usage of education and teaching technologies,” said Ye.

South Normal China University has migrated 7 applications to virtualization environment, including their course center, mobile learning platform, best selected courses website, billing center of Data Center Management, live broadcast system and their directory server of teaching demo system. With Mobile Learning Platform, students now can learn from courses anywhere and at any time they want to.