If you had to spec out a brand new server room

[twin--turbo]

My organisation is a SME with 500 Active users runing office and multiple bespoke applications with lots of data.

 

We dumped all the complexity of ISCSI/HBA's/FibreChannel and have switched to plain NFS over TCP/IP. Admitidly we moved to a 10Gb Switch with 2x connection to each device giving 20Gb.

 

as for shared vs local storage... Only used local for test systems for the last 9 years ( 7 with school, 2 with the SME ) everything esle is on shared for swift migration either in "Situations" or when work's are required.

 

TT

[mavhc]

Yeah, also depends on if it's expected to run 24/365, or you can take it offline in evenings/weekends/holidays to work on. There's probably some formula that says 1 hour's downtime is 10 times more expensive than 1 day's downtime, and 1 minute 10 times more than 1 hour.

[Trapper]

Well our budget isn't great, so I've been told to pare everything right back to the bone.

 

I've gone for original DL 380 G9 with dual CPU 64GB RAM and a few TB of storage. Alongside it will be two our our current ML 380s each of which runs 6 VMs with no trouble at all for failover.

 

It works and provides redundancy. I had to read between the lines a bit to find out why the encouragement to spend it all and get it right, had turned into much more reserved "Do we NEED this now?". I get the feeling we've wandered into a bit of a tightrope situation!

 

Thanks for the advice, all of has been exceptionally useful. I've had to pare more back to get the Datacentre licensing, I've managing on some old perpetual 2008 R2 licenses for Standard I inherited, but they just do not stretch far enough now!

 

Also an extra question: if you have ONE school, but split over THREE sites (one of which is a mile away) is it still considered ONE school?

[twin--turbo]

Well our budget isn't great, so I've been told to pare everything right back to the bone.

 

I've gone for original DL 380 G9 with dual CPU 64GB RAM and a few TB of storage. Alongside it will be two our our current ML 380s each of which runs 6 VMs with no trouble at all for failover.

 

It works and provides redundancy. I had to read between the lines a bit to find out why the encouragement to spend it all and get it right, had turned into much more reserved "Do we NEED this now?". I get the feeling we've wandered into a bit of a tightrope situation!

 

Thanks for the advice, all of has been exceptionally useful. I've had to pare more back to get the Datacentre licensing, I've managing on some old perpetual 2008 R2 licenses for Standard I inherited, but they just do not stretch far enough now!

 

Also an extra question: if you have ONE school, but split over THREE sites (one of which is a mile away) is it still considered ONE school?

 

If it's one school, one name. Yes.

 

But that does not mean a site licence covers all (depends on vendor)

 

TT

[PotNoodleTech]

Thanks for the advice, all of has been exceptionally useful. I've had to pare more back to get the Datacentre licensing, I've managing on some old perpetual 2008 R2 licenses for Standard I inherited, but they just do not stretch far enough now!

 

Use Microsoft EES licencing - it should work out considerably cheaper (unless you've got a very unusual school where you have more staff than pupils and hardly any pcs..), but it will be yearly payment rather than one off cost.

 

I recently licenced 2 x datacentre copies which lets me run unlimited VMS on my 2 hosts, and 1 x standard licence for the backup server - the cost was meagre given that I can deploy 100 win2012 r2 servers tomorrow if I need to, without having to worry about a single £1 extra in licencing costs.

[Trapper]

I was going to add it to the EES. Spread the cost.

 

Need to contact Capita then about our licensing!