Blue Skies - ideal setup for a primary

[speckytecky]

I have been giving a lot of thought recently to what would be the ideal ICT set up - current and projected to 5 years on, for a Primary School.

 

I believe the average Primary school will have somewhere in the region of 200 kids, 9 teachers / 8 classrooms and nowadays something like 3 Admin Staff. My gut feeling is that currently the set up in most will be a lone pedestal curriculum server running Windows 2003 Server. Perhaps a separate admin server for the MIS system Somewhere around 50 PC's running XP Pro - 5 being admin and 10 or so XP Pro notebooks. All served by three up to GB network switches. Backups via Backup Exec to either DAT72 or LTO of some version or other and predominantly Sophos as AV. Hopefully with both servers having UPS attached. Is this a sort of good guess or am I well wide of the mark?

 

Moving forward I can see that we are being driven toward Server 2008 and Windows 7 perhaps with SAN. Apologies for not listing anything on Open Source as it's virgin territory to me!

 

Apologies if this is the wrong area of the forum to post this thread.

[steveg]

We're a 420 pupil primary with a setup as follows:

 

1 exchange server, 1 sql (sims) server, 1 Terminal server, 1 remote access server and 2 file a print servers (being upgraded to 2008 over easter)

Aprox 200 client devices, over half of which are wireless running of a managed hp procurve wireless network, and soon to be 4gbit backbone with gig to the desktop everywhere. (summer upgrade)

 

One of the smaller schools we support only has 90 children, but 35 desktop and 45 wireless computers, with more coming, so will be 1:1 pupil to computer ratio after the summer.

 

Equally some of the schools we support are almost excatly what you have described above, - there is a huge variation between schools.

 

Nearly all the schools we support now backup remotely to servers at the LEA.

 

Looking to the future increased numbers of wireless devices are the way almost all of our schools are heading - we've purchased more netbooks in the last couple of years than anything else.

 

I think SAN's and any sort of major server upgrades are unlikely - most schools want to concentrate on the front end stuff that they actually see - its often hard to persuade them that they need to invest several thousand pounds in the back end kit to support it all. Most will replace their main server as its needed, and add storage etc, but multiple servers are still not very common even in larger primaries. (at least multiple modern servers anyway)

 

Steve

[superfletch]

As a generalisation aimed at summarising what's out there today I don't think your assessment is too wide of the mark whatsoever. There are however massive fluctuations between schools that are well kitted out and those which have little or nil kit altogether.

[Blue_Cookeh]

You nearly got us bang on!

 

~50 PCs

Two servers, one Server 2003 R2 for the curriculum and a seperate linux box for filtering

3 backbone switches

Unmanaged Wireless solution

 

We haven't had a 'proper' IT solution before so I'm slowly implementing one, right now we're sorting out netbooks for a class running Windows 7... giving me an excuse to finally get a secondary domain controller on Server 2008 R2 (which I may virtualise), will be moving the admin network to a domain and getting rid of any ancient PCs left over!! Although I don't see the need for a SAN anytime soon