SOFTWARE AND LICENSING
The RCG manages concurrent licenses for products such as Maple, Trend Anti-Virus, MATLAB as well as other software and toolboxes. Please contact us for the cost of purchasing any software or MATLAB toolboxes.
HARDWARE PURCHASES
Ask before you purchase. Consulting with the RCG or your school’s technical support staff can save you from having to buy hardware twice.
Summary
Dell is your best choice at SFU if you want to ensure maximum hardware compatibility and the best academic pricing. Choose products from the enterprise product lines (PowerEdge, Optiplex, Latitude).
Whitebox, consumer-grade, and non-Dell hardware may require significant manual work before it can be deployed.
A Typical Whitebox Horror Story
A consumer-grade desktop PC was purchased from a vendor not recommended by SFU.
Significant bugs in the BIOS rendered network booting useless. The vendor’s standalone and Windows-based BIOS update tools failed to run. After a long manual deployment process, the Linux drivers for the onboard RealTek Ethernet chipset proved unusable.