Durham School rolls back ICT

[Trust-No-One]

Exactly.

 

Consider this analogy. Let's presume you are forced to buy a new car to replace your current ageing, but fully-functioning car. You are told that your new car is shiny, all-singing, all-dancing and will cost a lot of money. But the crucial part is, you don't get to see the car, and you don't get to test drive the car, and you know very little about it. Yet you must buy it otherwise X, Y and Z happens. Except the new car hasn't passed its MOT yet

 

Reminds me of the old Ford Model T thing - you can have it in any colour as long as it's black.

Edited April 21, 2010 by Trust-No-One

[Trust-No-One]

Local paper The Northern Echo published a snippet about this in the readers' letters column on Saturday.

 

Flagship foul-up? (From The Northern Echo)

[Dataspire]

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Dos_Box

Edited November 26, 2010 by Dos_Box

[broc]

I work for an IT Company specialising in Citrix and have been aware of this project for a while, I think its worth pointing out that the plan itself is not a flawed one, in fact its very similar to a sucessful project we installed for all the schools on the isle of Guernsey last summer. Using a data centre, Citrix and running accross a WAN. The difference was pointed out by angryITguy, its all about the infrastructure and also possibly the method of desktop delivery (i.e. XenApp vs XenDesktop)

 

One comment on here stated that Thin Client was only suitable for single application use in businesses, just to clarify this, we have lots of schools running hundreds of applications with excellent performance on Thin Client and that includes flash, adobe, solidworks etc etc. If anybody wants to know more let me know.

 

Apologies for this sales insert but I fely compelled to comment on this thread.

 

Infrastructure is key to the success of this project; Guernsey has a population of 60,000, with around 7000 or so of secondary age and occupies 78sq km. Durham has around 45,000 secondary students and occupies 2400sq km with probably as many students as the whole of Guernsey in the first wave of schools.... the solution must scale and have the infrastructure in place to allow it to happen.

Edited April 27, 2010 by broc

[bossman]

@Dataspire:

 

How have you as a company enabled multi-media solutions as in the scenario, a student brings a camera with 450Mb of file he wants to upload to his/her work area for editing using thin client architecture?

 

Have you put in fat clients as part of the overall hybrid system or what?

 

I would really be interested in any details and designs you could offer and any documentary evidence to back up e.g. Documentation would be good to see the way your company has implemented the design (if possible) :-)

[Dataspire]

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Dos_Box

Edited November 26, 2010 by Dos_Box

[Trust-No-One]

In every single whole school solution that we have installed we have always included some element of fat clients even if it is just in the admin/library/LRC rooms etc. The solution we use to solve the problem of highly graphical apps such as movie maker or music apps is to use what we call a hybrid device. This device will run the majority of applications from the citrix server but a small number of apps such as cubase would run locally on that device (the user is unaware of where the app is launching from). The benefits of this are that you can still manage the majority of the apps on the device from the server farm as with traditional thin client but the processing power that is local to that device can be dedicated to run cubase therefore better performance and the device will have a longer life. I would also point out that there is only a very short list of applications that we cannot run completely over thin client.

 

The apps I understand, and also where this "hybrid" model comes in to run these apps locally.

 

But where does this user's data get stored, typically? Does Johnny's 400MB video stay local to that computer? Sent to the cloud? Does it get backed up? How will this affect other users?

 

I'm not trying to discredit your reasoning, just trying to understand the logistics from a practical point of view for real-world scenarios.

 

I thought the whole idea of a thin client system was that access terminals were low-cost, low-power devices to run anything from anywhere - everything was on the server. But with the introduction of the hybrid model, this obviously mandates that thin clients aren't as thin any more, which likely impacts power usage and also cost. In which case, why not just use traditional fat clients for what the difference is worth? The costings I've seen for hybrid TS devices are twice as much as our fat clients.

 

On a slightly related note, how well do your thin client/hybrid systems run over a wireless connection?

[GrumbleDook]

The hybrid model also has cost implications about support and deployment. If an app is hosted on the server then there is minimal support to manage this at the client end, helping to keep the costs down, so that only essential apps are deployed on the fat client. Ok ... this is presuming that it works all the time but there are some good examples of this (one of which is near me and supported by dataspire) ... but I do worry about the lack of in-house expertise reduces some of the chances for innovation and trying different things out.

[Dataspire]

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Dos_Box

Edited November 26, 2010 by Dos_Box

[torledo]

The apps I understand, and also where this "hybrid" model comes in to run these apps locally.

 

But where does this user's data get stored, typically? Does Johnny's 400MB video stay local to that computer? Sent to the cloud? Does it get backed up? How will this affect other users?

 

I'm not trying to discredit your reasoning, just trying to understand the logistics from a practical point of view for real-world scenarios.

 

I thought the whole idea of a thin client system was that access terminals were low-cost, low-power devices to run anything from anywhere - everything was on the server. But with the introduction of the hybrid model, this obviously mandates that thin clients aren't as thin any more, which likely impacts power usage and also cost. In which case, why not just use traditional fat clients for what the difference is worth? The costings I've seen for hybrid TS devices are twice as much as our fat clients.

 

On a slightly related note, how well do your thin client/hybrid systems run over a wireless connection?

 

i think your asking the right questions, and absolutely the questions that anyone looking at deploying such a system needs to ask.

 

This is my point about VDI not being the magic bullet.....well, atleast not when you look at some of the marketing and you think about cost-benefit analysis based on individual environments.

 

it seems to me that if the justification that only a fraction of the estate requires the local processing power and storage of fat clients, then your restricting what the majority of the estate can run if they are to be thin clients. Now that might not be a problem if the majority of the estate will never run powerful audio or video editing apps. But why restrict what you can/want to run in the future based on limitations that don't pose a problem today. That's not to say a VDI/hybrid model can't or shouldn't be deployed, there are clearly some big projects where such solutions have been deployed...and if more and more work is done using web apps then a thin/VDI solution seems well positioned to benefit from this trend...

 

but plenty of work has been done over the years to reduce the administrative burden when managing fat clients....and deploying thin software clients on fat machines is just one option of many.

 

the issue with having local execution of some apps or files with thin clients is that this can also be an additional licensing cost if software products are required to make it look 'seamless' to the user. This is where VDI products and thin client devices continue to evolve and require more features [and preferably at the same price] if they want to be able to cover more bases.

[bossman]

@Dataspire:

 

Speed we have, approx same as you have quoted for fat client logon 15-25 secs new profile cached profile 5-10secs.

Management of software we have can deploy software at the click of a button and have it installed immediately on the fat client workstation (knowing that it will run).

Power usage is slightly more per machine for our fat clients than thin (looking at ways to reduce this).

 

Storage and connectivity includes remote access from anywhere in the world (Cloud computing) and when we move onto our next platform we hope to move into the virtual desktop environment with Citrix which will allow our users access to their desktops anywhere and use all the software that the school resources has.We have bought and maintain our own SANs plus our whole infrastructure and have done for the past 9 years.

 

Obviously we have not spent the earth on our system but we have managed it well and the Infrastructure is there which is the key point in any good network whether it is LAN or WAN.

Why would we want a thin client architecture throughout the school if it doesn't deliver what we have now at even more expense to the school to fill the coffers of corporate businesses pushing totally new concepts for their own profits.

 

I don't want to seem against new concepts but when companies state one thing and they mean another then the confusion they cause along with the interruptions to the students teaching and learning has an impact on the schools involved, and all in the name of progress.

 

I don't doubt for one minute that your clients are as happy as can be with the solutions you have provided for them but what is the benchmark you use as the measurement of your success how have you measured it?

[mavhc]

a) web apps make investing in thin clients to make managing software more easily pointless

b) is it really that hard to make apps deploy? After spending a few days reading some web pages and with all free software I've got numbershark, workshark MSIs created from scratch, and MSTs for Promissor Administrator, O-Generator, Riff, Nessy Learning Programme and BSquared Connecting Steps deploying over 4 sites. Now companies are selling this streaming installation stuff it'd be even easier if you had money

[GrannyPeter]

The truth of it is that it’s a total failure. Private consultants paid thousands of pounds a day for doing nothing. Chaotic management from Durham County Council. Technical ineptness from Capita with no creativity or direction. Far worse than the IT solution the school already had. Millions pounds to set up and tying the school into a contract costing several thousands every year.

[mavhc]

Giant companies have no more clue than 1 person, they just have lots of layers of people with no clue to get to the 1 person with the same amount of clue as anyone here, and you can't talk to the person who's actually doing the work for you without 17 layers of Chinese whispers.

[GrannyPeter]

The school system is still not anywhere near functional or capable as of August the 6th 2010. What a total waste of tax payers money. Considering that the school used to pay around 40k a year and the setup cost for this has been around 6 million is just scandalous.

[NikChillin]

I heard similar stories from a staff member at another 'BSF' school down here the other day....... it must be difficult for the in house IT staff, tuped or not.

[AngryTechnician]

This made the local news again yesterday:

 

Computer system at Durham Johnston School scrapped (From Durham Times)

[jem961]

Im a student at DJ. IT DOES NOT WORK> IT CAN TAKE 30 MINS TO LOG ON TO A LAPTOP. I mean the old system was not good but atleast it worked

[webman]

jem961: Have you discussed the computer-related issues with other students in a formal way - e.g. school council or similar group? Have your concerns been relayed to staff at the school?

 

Is it a problem for everyone in all places within the school, or just certain people and specific locations/types of computer?

 

It's ridiculous that that learning time is still been negatively affected by the changes that the school has gone through.

[jem961]

Good news. New It system to be installed at Easter. Windows 7