Open Source Savings for a School District

A lot of people ask about the real savings that Open Source can bring to school districts. Noxon Schools has used Open Source software for 6 years now and so I wanted to demonstrate the actual savings and philosophy of Open Source in a real life setting.

Noxon Schools is a rural school district in remote northwest Montana with a student body of about 270 students. The school uses 4 Linux Terminal Servers on separate networks to serve 125 Linux Thin Clients. In addition, the school has a Web server, DNS server, 2 Proxy Servers, Backup Server and a Samba server to provide all of the services the school needs in house. 60 computers run Windows 2000 or XP.

Philosophy
As Technology Coordinator I am provided a budget to manage each year for the school's total technology development K-12. The bad news is, the budget changes every year, often the changes are as much as 40% from one year to the next. What this means is that you really cannot plan a five year project because likely the funds will not be available. This factor was one of the primary reasons I began to exam Open Source, we need stability. The expectations of administration, students and community is that technological assets will be available to every student in increasing complexity.
The second primary reason for examining Open Source is the ability to manipulate the Open Source product to meet our needs, not someone else's needs. We need servers that are setup the way we need them to be setup with the hardware we have available. We need desktops that will do what we want, not want some corporation dictates. In other words we need freedom and options.

The philosophy that I developed was then built upon economic necessity and practical necessity.

Before going into more detail it is important to understand what Open Source is all about (http://www.opensource.org). Open Source is software that is provided under a license that allows people to copy and distribute software freely as long as they distribute the source code so that all people have equal access to technology. What a powerful thought in a school system. Open Source products are available on the Linux platform as well as Windows and Mac. This is a factor that schools often overlook. They think that they must dump all of their Windows products to run Open Source products which is not true at all. OpenOffice (office suite), Gimp (image editing), Dia (diagramming program), Audacity (sound editing program) are all examples of Open Source software that will run on Windows and save a school tons of money.

Directions in Software Development
Software is influenced dramatically by the global push in technology. This is especially true in developing countries like China or continents like Africa and South America who are embracing technology like the rest of the world. This global push in technology is instrumental in the need for software that can interact with other software. OpenOffice is a part of a global standard for software that is building in interest. Here is the Mission Statement for OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org, “Mission Statement -To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.” This is actually a very interesting proposition where all people can share information using one standard that is open to all and not controlled by one corporation. This is a primary reason that OpenOffice is gaining so much influence world wide and should be gaining more influence in school system especially.

Open Source Savings with OpenOffice

http://www.openoffice.org/index.html

OpenOffice 2 History

In 2000 Sun Microsystems donated the code for OpenOffice to the community. The last 5 years has seen tremendous work done in a collaborative way from thousands of programmers world wide who donate their time and effort to OpenOffice. In addition, major corporations have endorsed the project with recognition and financial support. These corporations include Red Hat, Novell, Intel, Debian and recently Google. Although it is difficult to measure, somewhere between 50 to 60 million people are using OpenOffice right now.

Many people are familiar with Microsoft Office and the features that it provides. OpenOffice is a product that provides about 93% of the features that are included in Microsoft Office. Most of the features that are not available are in the works. But let's get real in a comparison, most people use only 5% of Office software, basic word processing and basic spreadsheets. So for those people there is not a real issue at all.

The Cost Savings of Open Source - OpenOffice 2
The Academic price for Microsoft Professional Office is $64.52 per user. We here at Noxon Schools have 185 computers in use which translates into $11,936.20 for Microsoft Office. The regular Professional Office is $158.84 without an Academic license. Over a 10 year period you will probably upgrade 3 times, at least in a school setting probably more often in a business. So if you upgrade 3 times and have 185 computers you are looking at approximately $50,000 for 10 years (considering that software prices go up). The cost of OpenOffice 2 is $0....yep, nothing.

OpenOffice 2 Cost for 185 computers = 0 ($0 over 10 years)
Microsoft Office Cost for 185 computers = $11,936.20 ($50,000 over 10 years)

ClamAV AntiVirus Software

Noxon Schools just like any organization must deal with the constant threat of Virus attack. The school district has over 1000 GB of data that must be protected from damage by Virus activity. It is important to guard this data with the utmost care as it would be impossible to replace some of the information that is on the network. Many people who do not work on a network do not recognize the potential for disaster. On a network a virus will impact the entire network of 185 computers in a matter of seconds. Therefore it is imperative to be vigilant in protecting that information.

Noxon Schools has tried several vendors to try to deal with Virus activity. At one point Symantec Enterprise solution was used that cost $51.60 per workstation. To manage 185 computers the cost would be $9546.00. To use McAfee would cost $28.50 per workstation with a cost of $5272.50 and this would not protect mail servers, data servers or web servers. The school worked a deal with MicroWorld.com for $1000 to cover 50 computers. This was closer to an affordable option but it did nothing to protect servers or Linux workstations. All of these solutions left holes in the Anti-Virus protection because the school could not afford a total solution nor did the solutions cover all of the required areas like all workstations (Windows and Linux) and servers.

The School solved these issues by moving to an Open Source Program called ClamAV. The Windows version is found at http://www.clamwin.com and the Linux version at http://clamav.net. This FREE Anti-Virus program not only was a financially beneficial solution but it also covered all workstations (Windows and Linux) and all servers.

As a result the School has saved over $4000 each year as it would cost this much for workstation coverage and server coverage. The five year savings is $20,000. Ten year savings $40,000.

Server Software Using Open Source

Noxon Schools uses Open Source operating systems for all servers at the school. This includes Web Servers, DNS Servers, Data Servers and Mail Servers.

In the past the school has used Novell for a network operating system which cost the school $1000 each year in a yearly agreement which in the end left the school with no software whatsoever. The Novell Netware servers constantly needed attention as the bugs in the software were often creating problems. In addition, Netware continually required bigger hardware to function which resulted in additional hardware costs. Therefore it is difficult to assess the actual cost of the networking software.

Microsoft Servers
An estimate to purchase equivalent licenses and services vi Microsoft to provide email, web server, DNS, backup server, data servers, etc. came in at $7889 which is the Academic price.

The school eventually moved to Red Hat Enterprise, SUSE and Slackware as options. Red Hat Enterprise is used for critical servers for a yearly subscription of $50 each server (Academic price). Terminal servers are SUSE which is free and Slackware is used on laptops (also free).

Microsoft $7889 (10 Year estimate $23,667)
Novell Yearly Subscription $1000 (10 Year estimate $10,000)
Red Hat Enterprise Yearly Subscription $150.00 (10 Year estimate $$1500.00)
Linux Centos Enterprise (RHEL clone which works great) $0 (10 Year subscription $0)

LTSP Terminal Server
When I first came to be Technical Coordinator at Noxon Schools, they had 35 Windows machines running Windows 95. The Technology budget would only purchase 2 or 3 computers a year and there was no network. I was part of a team that wrote a $150,000 grant for technology and that gave us the ability to install a basic network and build two computer labs with used equipment. The real problem with grants is that they do not sustain technology. Hardware and software needs to be replaced every 3 years if you are going to have decent technology. There was no way we could physically keep writing grants to sustain the technology in the school system. That is when I began to develop the LTSP server project( http://ltsp.org). This project would take a powerful server and connect to terminals, workstations without hard drives, CDROMS, etc. The great thing about this is that old computers, those that others are throwing away, can be used effectively with Linux and the LTSP project to create fast workstations.

The school had access to 100 computers that were discarded because they would not run Windows any longer from the State of Montana. The hard drives and CDROMS were removed and standard network cards were placed in each one.
A Linux Terminal Server was built and installed. One of the greatest aspects of Thin Clients is that configuration only has to be done on the server, thus saving a great deal of maintenance and upgrades. The server configuration was a dual Xeon with 4 GB of RAM on SCSI disk drives, built for $3000. All of the 100 computers and monitors were free, the only cost was standard network cards for $15 each. Total cost for 100 computers $4500. One important point about this is that the hardware will function for a very long time, as the real work is all done on the server not the workstations. Later the network was divided up and 3 more terminal servers were installed with a total cost of $4000 more.

Summary:

Office Suite
OpenOffice Cost for 185 computers = 0 ($0 over 10 years)
Microsoft Office Cost for 185 computers = $11,936.20 ($50,000 over 10 years)

Anti-Virus Software – ClamAV
ClamAv Cost for 185 computers/servers = 0 ($0 over 10 years)
Other Anti-Virus Vendors - $4000 ($40,000 over 10 years)

Servers
Red Hat Enterprise 3 servers - $150 ($1500 over 10 years)
SUSE, Slackware - $0 ($0 over 10 years)
Microsoft $7889 (10 Year estimate $23,667)
Novell Yearly Subscription $1000 (10 Year estimate $10,000)

Hardware
LTSP Server and 100 workstations - $4500
3 additional LTSP Servers - $4000
100 New Computers and Server Hardware for Microsoft Product $78,500.00
10 Year Cost Estimate (upgrade 3 times) - $225,000

Total Open Source Savings for Setup - $92,675.20
Ten Year Savings - $338,667.00

The reality of these figures for Noxon Schools is that if we had Microsoft products only we would not have185 computers we would have 50 because that is all we could sustain. That is the big difference for us.

Mike Weber may be contacted Here
Tech Coordinator Noxon School Districts