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Napster and Dell have recently announced a partnership that will bring both companies to greater prominence across our nation’s institutions of higher learning. Napster, the digital music pioneer, and computer manufacturer Dell have partnered to help colleges and universities offer their students legal access to Napster’s music downloading services. The partnership will help incorporate Napster’s famous music services and popular applications with Dell’s PowerEdge 1855 blade servers.

With the help of Dell, Napster hopes to help colleges and universities increase their network bandwidth availability that will allow students to access Napster’s premium, and completely legal, music service. The partnership between Napster and Dell was formed to address many of the problems that have plagued both Napster and college and university campuses across the country. Napster (or at least the original incarnation of Napster) can trace much of its popularity and success back to college and university campuses across the United States.

Back when Napster facilitated free (and eventually, illegal) downloading via its peer-to-peer file sharing systems, college students were the segment of the population most likely to partake in such activities. As more and more college students used Napster to upload and download their favorite music files, colleges and universities across the country found that they were experiencing problems with their network bandwidth availability. The constant uploading and downloading of music files was causing a strain on many computer networks on campuses across the country. Another problem that many colleges and universities faced with the advent of the original Napster application was the possibility of viruses, spy ware programs, and other palpable security risks that the use of Napster introduced to college and university computer networks.

The partnership between Napster and Dell systems addresses many of these bandwidth and security issues. The Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers help colleges and universities to increase their network bandwidth availability, and it allows students access to Napster without fear of introducing viruses, spy ware programs or other security risks into the campus computer networks. Downloading unauthorized music files always puts networks at a risk for these things, but the Napster and Dell partnership are poised to lessen these risks considerably. The first university to take advantage of the Napster and Dell partnership will be the University of Washington (UW).

The partnership between Dell and Napster is being viewed by many analysts and critics and a comprehensive solution to the problems that have plagued music downloading on college and university campuses for many years now. Hopefully, this IT partnership will help solve many of the problems and complaints that schools and students have made in the past years. Napster and Dell will be working jointly to promote their newfound partnership. Dell will begin to actively promote and sell subscriptions to Napster’s digital music services to colleges and universities across the United States at a discounted academic rate. Dell is offering colleges and universities the opportunity to store its Dell blade servers on campus in order to store files that stem from use of Napster. This will allow significant network processing speed increases at colleges and universities who take advantage of having the Dell blade servers located right on their campus.

In essence, all the music that students download from the Napster music service would be stored on a caching server that would be located within the campus network. The use of local Dell server would vastly improve the speed and quality of using the Napster music services on a college or university campus. It is expected that many other universities will follow the University of Washington’s example and opt to take part in the Napster and Dell partnership.