Primary school (from standalone to server)

[jamin100]

jeebus they must have money to burn

 

No not really but the head knows how important ICT is and wants to invest for the future.

At the moment we have 4 pedestal servers doing various roles which are coming up to 5 years old and really starting to show their age.

I've brought the GL380 this year and have it running 2 virtual machines. The eventual plan is to get another beefy server next year and do away with the old pedestal servers and just run these with a few virtual machines etc.

 

Get a semi decent SAN and then if one server dies the other one should be able to take over without breaking a sweat.

[mthomas08]

No not really but the head knows how important ICT is and wants to invest for the future.

At the moment we have 4 pedestal servers doing various roles which are coming up to 5 years old and really starting to show their age.

I've brought the GL380 this year and have it running 2 virtual machines. The eventual plan is to get another beefy server next year and do away with the old pedestal servers and just run these with a few virtual machines etc.

 

Get a semi decent SAN and then if one server dies the other one should be able to take over without breaking a sweat.

 

Strange that, when they realise they need to spend the dosh things tend to change

 

It is exactly what happened here, now instead of having endless towers stacked up on top of each other, we now have decent rack servers, a dedicated GC box, A Virtual box doing 4 important jobs instead of having 4 crappy servers requiring reboots. If you have the money I would always recommend spending it and doing the BIG job right so you are sorted for more then the typical 3-5 years. This not only allows your system to grow but allows you breathing room to expand if you choose to go Exchange/Internet/Laptops for all staff and a ton of PCs.

 

I just remember being told our previous servers were "OverKill" when we first purchased them, now we were pretty much forced to upgrade when we went down the exchange 2010 route. Previous servers were not setup with RAID either so hanging on a knife edge was no longer a good thing. Our new servers are rack mount DELL (not cheap companies that no one heard of) we have had zero issues with them, RAID setup so we can lose a HD in either of them, extra network ports/PSUs. Some one would tell me they are too over kill but I simply can not have an email server which loses a HD and goes down.

 

Not a rant but just stating facts from our own site experience, one site to another will be totally different but our system must be only pretty much 24/7.