Moving IT Forward

[Cache]

Morning all

 

Yesterday I was caught a little by surprise by the question from somebody what do you think we should be doing to move the IT infrastructure forward over the next few years or what direction should we be heading in.

 

To be fair while we have no money, the network isn't in a bad shape. We're mostly virtualised with just a couple of physical boxes (smoothwall/backup nas/DC) and the switch and cabling infrastructure while now old the majority of switches are managed and the network itself copes quite well. We use Office 365 for email quite well, have an onsite Moodle which a few staff use for courses.

 

The only thing that came into my head at that time was 2 things:

 

1. Need to see where things are heading with the cloud
   
2. What do you want the network to be able to do/cope with
   

 

Thinking more now then refreshing the cabling, particularly fibre links and upgrading the switches again for 10gb backbone/ 1gb to the desktop might have been a good answer but at the same time we were reviewing the next 3 years budget and I know there is no extra money that can go in them or that could fund such a project.

 

Am I missing somewhere the great big plan of what we need to be doing or where I should be heading/pushing the school IT? At the moment because there doesn't seem to be any certainty I can't see any major direction forward and not being able to come up with a convincing answer at the time I may well have missed my opportunity.

[pcstru]

You didn't mention wireless, does that mean it is all OK or that you don't have any?

[synaesthesia]

What drives school IT forward first and foremost is the curriculum and use of that equipment. What is going to come up in terms of student and staff usage of IT and then how can you help provide for that whilst retaining replacement schedules etc.

[TechMonkey]

What drives school IT forward first and foremost is the curriculum and use of that equipment. What is going to come up in terms of student and staff usage of IT and then how can you help provide for that whilst retaining replacement schedules etc.

 

This. Look or ask for the School Development Plan and see what is being planned and in what time frames. Get a sit down with the Bursar/business manager and find out what long term plans there are. Get a sit down with the Head of Academic/SMT in charge of Academic and find out if there are any changes or plans afoot.

 

Get your 3 Year plan updated with an in brief section out to 5 years.

 

Finally make sure your house is in order. Try and answer questions about your infrastructure using only an external connection or a mobile device to check what you can't get your hands on in case of no access to site or loss of connection. Has the school got a Disaster Recovery/Business continuity plan and do your plans fit in with those?

 

As for cloud, have you looked at O365/Google Docs? Has any teacher shown an interest? Would it help support the curriculum and Teaching and Learning? Minimum you could do is move your mail to one of the services. This way you reduce the resources needed on site slightly and bolster your DR/BC.

[Cache]

@pcstru - Wireless we've put Unifi in over the last 2 years which has just about given full site coverage for the buildings apart from 2 small areas which with enough budget remaining in the summer I can purchase the additional AP's to cover that.

 

PC's we've sat down and mapped out the replacement for the next 3 years and then for the 5 year plan we'll hit back to hopefully replacing what we've done in the last 2.

 

To be fair then, the answer to the question what do you want the network to do/cope with which I gave was fine because I don't put anything in place to hamper what needs to be done and will come up with a workaround in most cases. I am just at that point at the moment, probably like a few others, in that I don't know which direction things are going, I am going or schools are going.

[mikkydoos]

I think at present cloud services are in their infancy and there hasn't been a settling down of products/services that suit a school.

Google for Edu is one thats an early contender and some schools have adopted.

 

My plan is not make any major investments for a year or maybe more until the direction of future platforms becomes clearer.

 

Certainly it will be internet reliant so filters/firewalls/wifi/mobile will be absolutely key.

 

I see the traditional Windows network going out of the window in not too long.

[saggu]

I am been challenged with this question recently- plan to improve IT system!!

 

Being in a Primary school my answers were same as @Cache and @TeachMonkey. What is the School development plan? Then it can be decided how IT can support towards that goal.

 

But seems like I am missing something too!!

 

How the Network Managers manage their IT inventory? do you mention when the equipments are due to be replaced/thrown out? Make year/3 years plan.

 

Thanks in advance for sharing this.

[Cache]

Our inventory is all stored in GLPI with purchase date and other details, we working towards a 5 year replacement cycle however in the last couple of years that got put to one side due to constant budget cuts.

 

Our new business manager does recognise the importance of ensuring the kit is actually workable and usable so we have planned off the inventory a replacement cycle or replacement and relocation cycle to make sure we are able to keep things moving forward. We hit most of this years replacements and next year should be able to mop up the dozen or so that we've missed due to failures of other kit. Staff have all been issued with a rough outline of the plan so that they are aware of what we are planning to do when.

[jthompson]

For me, it's all about how many old machines you have, rather than how many new ones you have.

All our purchase dates and warranty periods are stored in GLPI. We usually buy machines with 5 year warranties. Each year, I export all that to Excel to put together a gantt chart effectively showing the age of all the clusters around school. It makes it really clear where the old machines are that should be replaced, but you can also see a decent picture of how that will look in the years to follow. We try to buy in a batch of machines to be able to retire older stuff, but also trying to make that batch a similar size each year: one especially big batch of new machines is great when you get it, but causes problems 5 or 6 years down the line when you find that you've got loads of old machines to try and get replaced.

[saggu]

Sounds good plan@cache and @jthompson. what do you do with the old machines?

[3s-gtech]

See, I ignore age and look instead at modern driver support and whether the hardware still meets our needs for the software we use. Thus we still use 8 year old machines and I don't have direct plans to replace them - they will run Windows 10 well and all software we use. They have been heavily upgraded based on minimum specs we agreed on (dual or more cores, 4GB+ RAM, SSD, 1080p monitor). So long as the suites still look smart (new mice etc can help) I can move things forward in software alone. It's saving me a staff member's wages per year.