Meet our EDU team at EDUCAUSE 2024

We’re excited to announce our participation in EDUCAUSE 2024 from 21 to 24 October. We’re looking forward to meeting many of our partners and customers in person. Stop by our booth, number 4047, to join the conversation about building open-source cloud and virtualization in a secure environment.  

Ubuntu in Education 

Ubuntu has long been a preferred operating system for Universities and colleges. The ease of use, user-friendliness, and security that Ubuntu offers are a perfect foundation for reliable infrastructure. 

However, Canonical solutions for academic institutions for long are not limited to the beloved operating system. Here are just a couple of examples of the leading Universities taking advantage of the open-source products and tools we provide. 

University of Alabama at Birmingham accelerates research with Canonical Charmed Infrastructure and Ceph on Dell infrastructure

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is an internationally renowned public research university and academic medical center that has more than 22,000 students enrolled and over 24,000 faculty members. UAB generates $12.1 billion in annual economic impact within the State of Alabama.

UAB is committed to empowering its researchers with all of the tools and technologies they need to work as efficiently and effectively as possible. With the rise of containerisation, the university saw an opportunity to further accelerate research by transforming its approach to compute and storage resource management through Kubernetes. 

To make this vision a reality, the organization turned to its trusted partners Dell Technologies and Canonical.

“The fact that Canonical and Dell had a partnership made it easy for us to act on our deployment goals.”

Read the full case study here

How New Mexico State University accelerates compliant federal research with Ubuntu

With the introduction of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0 program and FIPS 140 validated cryptography, New Mexico State University’s Physical Science Laboratory (PSL) was under pressure to find a new operating system that would meet these stringent compliance standards. At the same time the right choice would need to be easy to use for their team of in-house researchers and student hires. 

PSL was using CentOS, which was about to be discontinued. This sent them on a mission to find a cost-effective, easy-to-use, and compliant alternative.

After a series of trials, Ubuntu emerged as the clear choice for PSL. It wasn’t just that Ubuntu offered the necessary FIPS 140 certification through Ubuntu Pro at a price 4-5 times lower than other options; Ubuntu also has an intuitive design and large open source community, along with comprehensive and free documentation, making it the ideal solution for PSL’s diverse team. 

Transitioning to a new OS could have been a disruptive process, but thanks to the simplicity of Ubuntu and wealth of online resources, the shift was almost seamless. 

The feedback from the team at PSL says it all. As Ed Zenisek, IT Manager at PSL, puts it, “Info on Ubuntu is right there at our fingertips. Anything we need to know is always just a Google search away, so whatever issues we run into are easy to solve”.

Learn how PSL achieved CMMC certification here 

Building open-source cloud

At EDUCAUSE we will also talk about building and managing open-source private cloud solutions. Alongside Canonical Openstack, now we’re offering Microclouds, small-scale clouds optimized for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. 

Microclouds consist of low-footprint clusters of compute nodes with distributed storage and secure networking. They can serve as small-scale private clouds, or as edge clouds distributed across a number of locations.

Microclouds are a great fit to build a new infrastructure and an alternative to many solutions offered by Vmware. 

Learn how Canonical empowers Université de l’Ontario Français dream of rapid scaling through MicroCloud and enterprise support here. 

What else?

Ubuntu Pro, Kubernetes, Openstack and Microcloud are just several examples of multiple open-source solutions we’re offering at Canonical. Visit our team at booth #4047 and bring us any open-source challenge and we will be happy to solve it for you! 

If you’d like to learn more about open-source solutions for your organization book an in-person time with EDU Account Executives Carlos Falsiroli or Hannah Watson here.