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Yuba County Achieves Efficiency with Open Source and Red Hat

With over thirty years of experience in the industry, IT Director Steve O'Toole at Yuba County Unified School District (YCUSD) in Northern California finds that open source and Red Hat provides the efficiency, reliability and cost savings which he needs to keep the department ahead of the curve. YCUSD is running Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP also known as "LAMP" for web, front-end firewalls and filtering in the mid-tier range. "Today, the district runs QSS financial systems on MPE and next year we'll be running it on Linux," says Steve O'Toole.

Currently, his staff is covering 14 schools, over 6800 students with an additional two schools being built on the way. With two techs for 4000 computers and one network specialist for 40 servers, he looks to open source and Red Hat to to make things work.

"My driving goals in the IT department is efficiency. Efficiency consists of choosing systems with proven reliability while saving money and that is where open source comes in.

"From a budget perspective what it costs in maintenance fees on our HP 3000 mainframe, I'm going to be able to purchase a much faster HP dual quad processor server running Linux. I'll improve our disaster recovery strategy by butting two systems to make us fully redundant. And after that it's savings back to the school district's general fund."

"The surprising thing is when I tell my guys that I'm going to bring up a Red Hat server and run multiple domains. I tell them we are going to do all this cool stuff with web management and it will be up and running by lunch." Their response? "They all laugh but by lunch you're done and you never have to touch it again and in two years time, your maintenance has consisted of updating your web pages.

"I've known about Linux for a long time and I really admire the robustness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Fedora project. The story I tell is that when you take the time and setup a server running Red Hat, it is reliable and cost efficient and in this business, that means everything."