According to the companies, the new offering will combine Napster’s digital music service with Dell’s PowerEdge 1855 blade servers. Students can then use the servers to store music from Napster’s song archive in a local network. It is hoped this will increase the colleges’ network bandwidth availability and eliminate the risk of viruses that usually accompany unauthorized downloaded tracks.
The University of Washington (UW) will be the first school to employ the new system, which is expected to take place this fall. Dell will install 10 of its PowerEdge 1855 blade servers on the university’s Seattle campus which will feature Napster’s SuperPeer cache application, a platform designed to deliver music and other Napster content stored on a caching server located within the campus network.
Dell is also planning to sell subscriptions to Napster’s digital music service to colleges and universities at a discounted academic rate, as well as its own computer systems, electronics and DJ digital music players.
Napster says the partnership will boost its university initiative that it launched in November 2003.
