We're going MAC!

[techyphil]

Hey,

 

Yup we're looking to rip out our music suite and start over. I've spec'd up iMac 21.5" with a Mac Mini Server for management. We was hoping to use the existing home directories on our AD network. However, since visiting another school, they found space was a huge issue and therefore got xTB of storage. I put my concerns to our consultant who will help with the install and he agreed you would need a lot of space. He assumed we had loads already on our existing network.

 

So, here I am hoping you guys would help me find a storage server that's extremely fast and capable of storing lots of music projects that's Mac Lion Server compatible. I've heard Lion manages SMB shares differently. Should we go SAN? Locally attached Storage? If I got a Mac Pro Server with a RAID Card and xTB of storage, I'd need another NAS/SAN to store the server backups!

 

Christ, this stuff is incredibly expensive

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

[techyphil]

Sorry I forgot to mention that we've got very little money.

[mellowip1983]

Hi Phil,

 

We had a room of 25 iMacs installed in the summer, on average each of our students has about 500MB of quota just for basic word processing, excel.

 

This integrates into our RM CC4 environment so documents are backed up from windows shares. The big job they do is video editing that is done logged on as a local user and the work is not backed up purely because of lack of space.

[3s-gtech]

Good luck then! ProTools, Logic etc want locally stored files to work on, they just don't play nicely with projects across the network. It's fine to move them into place, but not for on-the-fly work. So you have two choices - a storage server where the kids copy the work to, then move it to a local directory on the Macs to work on. Or, a storage server that has sufficient grunt to allow network file access - I can't remember the models I found now but prices are best described as 'enterprise level'. Things may have changed recently on this so others may have differing views, but I found it was prohibitively expensive so just setup a shared folder on the Mac server for their projects.

[Carter]

We use DeepFreeze so the computers are always in the same fresh state and all profiles are wiped out right after a reboot. All students are told they have to use an external HD/thumb drive in order to save files.

[techyphil]

Guys, you are awesome. It's good to know of these problems. So how does Mac OS work with regards to home directories? I've heard of two methods...

 

1. Their home drive is directly mounted to our Windows Shares. Files are instantly worked on from there.

2. Their home drive is downloaded to the Mac Client, where applications work directly with the "cached" copy on the client. Changes are sync'ed back to the Server.

 

I can see flaws with either method working with massive file types.

 

How's the external hard drive system working out for you Carter? What's the general file size being saved to the drive? Do they have to remember to save 5mins before logoff to ensure it has time to copy fully?

 

Thanks again!

[Jamo]

Guys, you are awesome. It's good to know of these problems. So how does Mac OS work with regards to home directories? I've heard of two methods...

 

1. Their home drive is directly mounted to our Windows Shares. Files are instantly worked on from there.

2. Their home drive is downloaded to the Mac Client, where applications work directly with the "cached" copy on the client. Changes are sync'ed back to the Server.

 

I can see flaws with either method working with massive file types.

 

How's the external hard drive system working out for you Carter? What's the general file size being saved to the drive? Do they have to remember to save 5mins before logoff to ensure it has time to copy fully?

 

Thanks again!

 

I wish you the best of luck!!!!

 

One word of advice!!

 

Play it the Mac way, integrating them too tight with Windows caused REALLY odd problems, IE using a non OSx formatted network drive home share meant that iPhoto didn't work without redirecting to a different folder which was formatted by OSx. Also if the user ran out of drive space things started to go crazy apps wouldn't open etc and it didn't mention anything about running out of space!

[Ashm]

Guys, you are awesome. It's good to know of these problems. So how does Mac OS work with regards to home directories? I've heard of two methods...

 

1. Their home drive is directly mounted to our Windows Shares. Files are instantly worked on from there.

2. Their home drive is downloaded to the Mac Client, where applications work directly with the "cached" copy on the client. Changes are sync'ed back to the Server.

 

I can see flaws with either method working with massive file types.

 

How's the external hard drive system working out for you Carter? What's the general file size being saved to the drive? Do they have to remember to save 5mins before logoff to ensure it has time to copy fully?

 

Thanks again!

The second method you've said is what we use for our Macs. Using mobile accounts allows the home directories to be synced with the Mac server on login and log off and also in the background with the Mac server. This way all the Mac apps will saving locally to the Mac (avoiding problems with apps that don't work well saving over the network and speed will be better). This way at least the users don't have to do any copying to different areas etc they just save their work as normal and everything is synced with the server.

 

I would recommend a gigabit connection to all the Macs and the Mac server to improve sync times if possible.

[MicrodigitUK]

The second method you've said is what we use for our Macs. Using mobile accounts allows the home directories to be synced with the Mac server on login and log off and also in the background with the Mac server. This way all the Mac apps will saving locally to the Mac (avoiding problems with apps that don't work well saving over the network and speed will be better). This way at least the users don't have to do any copying to different areas etc they just save their work as normal and everything is synced with the server.

 

I would recommend a gigabit connection to all the Macs and the Mac server to improve sync times if possible.

 

1+ we also use the second option to sync to CIFS on our EMC VNXe SAN. The CIFS shares also are used as home drives on windows network with Microsoft Disk quotas setup. Our only issue is if user has no Quota remaining on CIFS share it fails to sync files from OSX and users could loos files. We are working on a Quota service for OSX to warn users of quota to fix this issue. Also another issue for me was EMC don't actually support OSX on VNXe so that was a fun time with support when I had an issue with OSX sync..... You can use any server/NAS/SAN that supports CIFS to sync OSX and use for your Windows home drives. You could build your own NAS/SAN with somthing like sourceforge.net/projects/openfiler and a server with lots of HDD's. That will save you on the prices EMC/Netapp/Dell/Oracle ask for a NAS/SAN with TB's of storage.

[GrumbleDook]

@Ashm If you are using mobile accounts do you come across issues with the sheer size of some of the files to be synced or the amount of space they take up on the client? Just thinking about some very large music or video projects, or students with multiple projects ...

[Ashm]

We did have issues prior to upgrading to Snow Leopard on our older Macs over time where a large number of students had logged in and the hard drives would run out of space (they only have 120GB hard disks or something around that size). Even though the cached mobile accounts are supposed to delete off the clients after set time (and after it has had a successful sync). So far we've not had that problem again but it could be because they were all freshly re-imaged in September!

 

In terms of large files and syncing, we do have a staff member that's the main Mac user in the school who has a 50GB+ mobile account (Several years worth of Media Projects files etc) and admittedly that does take an age to sync the first time but once it's done as he uses the same Mac normally it's fairly quick to log in & log off as it just does a file sync check.

[alttab]

Hey,

 

Yup we're looking to rip out our music suite and start over. I've spec'd up iMac 21.5" with a Mac Mini Server for management. We was hoping to use the existing home directories on our AD network. However, since visiting another school, they found space was a huge issue and therefore got xTB of storage. I put my concerns to our consultant who will help with the install and he agreed you would need a lot of space. He assumed we had loads already on our existing network.

 

So, here I am hoping you guys would help me find a storage server that's extremely fast and capable of storing lots of music projects that's Mac Lion Server compatible. I've heard Lion manages SMB shares differently. Should we go SAN? Locally attached Storage? If I got a Mac Pro Server with a RAID Card and xTB of storage, I'd need another NAS/SAN to store the server backups!

 

Christ, this stuff is incredibly expensive

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

space and performance, and even the way some osx apps save, is the issue. not just space. it used to be that you could get away with on-the-fly access and editing of iMovie HD projects if you had gigabit to the desktop, link aggregated GigE ports on your server and a storage array with a few disks, but even then you had limits on how much you could scale that - i wouldn't want to have tried it with more 25 simultaneous users but then i understand iMovie projects changed in how they were saved in later versions, and so on-the-fly to a network location became difficult [probably unsupported] even for the entry level product, and that's before you even get to stuff like final cut or on the audio side logic where you'd need the performance of local disk.

 

maybe some kind of out of hours copy of work is a better option than the syncing back of forth of data using mobile accounts during the day, if there is to be a lot of large media files. but then i'd guess you may have to look at what needs doing to ensure there isn't too much duplication of data with that approach.

[HodgeHi]

Don't forget, if you decide to do something similar to Carter, with your users using external USB drives, you could always look at using External accounts. This allows for the users to carry their entire Home Dir on the External drive. With this method they can carry all their data with them and visit any mac in the room. They simply plug in their device and their account pops up on the login screen, allowing them to log in. If this is a viable option then maybe give it some thought. I would like to implement it here. It could simplify the entire process. Of course you do have the potential for lost/damaged drives. Not sure if they work with Networked accounts though, but it may be worth a look.

[HodgeHi]

I would also take a look at the potential of Thunderbolt drives. Remember that you can daisy chain a few together and still get the full 10Gb up and down across each connection. This is something else that I was considering but need to trial it first.

 

In theory you could have 2 mac minis with 2 thunderbolt drives connected together one could be a mirror of the other while having both macs accessing the data across the connections.

[GrumbleDook]

A *looong* while ago I did look at the use of IP over FireWire for something similar but the storage device promising the earth never appeared in the end. It might be worth giving the Wildern folk more of a prod to see how they did it *with* money and see whether that could be translated to a cheaper / heath-robinson version.

[talksr]

Good luck with your install, it is sure to be an improvement to what you had before.

 

I am very interested to know how others who have priced or got quotes on Apple systems feel about the costs?

Do you get any kind of discounts for buying in bulk and does it work out reasonable?

 

I know all schools get educational discount, but with Apple computers costing more to start with, the discount only brings the prices down slightly.

 

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Rob

[iSteve]

You haven't said what software you will be using. For example, we have had classes of 30 kids using GarageBand straight on to network home directories and it works fine. Though if your music people will be using huge files you will be better saving, or working from the local HDD then copying or exporting final projects back.

 

To clarify an earlier point - iPhoto will only work with Mac OS Extended (HFS+) file systems, so if your students home folders are on a SMB share iPhoto won't like it.

 

(Re: price, we have found Apple kit reasonable when comparing against very similar hardware and factoring in the bundled software. Their remote control and server software is also very very cheap against the Windows counterparts).

 

One final pedant - it's Mac. Short for Macintosh. MAC suggests an acronym

[talksr]

You haven't said what software you will be using. For example, we have had classes of 30 kids using GarageBand straight on to network home directories and it works fine. Though if your music people will be using huge files you will be better saving, or working from the local HDD then copying or exporting final projects back.

 

To clarify an earlier point - iPhoto will only work with Mac OS Extended (HFS+) file systems, so if your students home folders are on a SMB share iPhoto won't like it.

 

(Re: price, we have found Apple kit reasonable when comparing against very similar hardware and factoring in the bundled software. Their remote control and server software is also very very cheap against the Windows counterparts).

 

One final pedant - it's Mac. Short for Macintosh. MAC suggests an acronym

 

 

Hi, thanks for your detailed reply. I am very surprised I managed to cobble together my post with very little mistakes as I was talking with someone whilst writing. Apologies about not mentioning the sw we would be using. We are a primary school and these systems would be primarily for KeyStage 1 so you are talking the younger kids up to around year 2.

The main apps they use are 2Simple packages which I am sure you can obtain Mac copies of, lots of online resources etc.

I am convinced the Apple hardware lasts alot longer than counterparts both in build and usability (if you buy a decent system it tends to still run very well years after a Windows based system).

 

I have been very impressed with the remote control software for Macs. I have been using one called Remote Desktop - lovely application, runs very smooth even on my very slow out in the sticks country internet connection.

 

Thanks again for your help

[iSteve]

I have not come across 2Simple so I will make a very generalised stab in the dark that if it is pitched at year 2 students, we're not talking multi track / multi channel audio software with huge files and so on, so would probably work fine over network based home folders.

 

Remove Desktop is great, very capable software.

[glennda]

I'll explain what we have done.

 

We thought about the Mac throughout music but decided overall the cost was going to be too much. Instead we setup the following.

 

15 x Stone Desktops - Intel Core I3, 4Gb Ram, 64GB SSD. On these machines they have - USB Sound Cards (I'll find you model numbers later). USB Keyboards. The USB Keyboards came with Cubase LE Free. They also have access to various other music software such as Sequel and Sibelius. They machines are all off the Domain but do have a little app which is launched on boot which asks for a Username and Password (these are AD usernames). They then make a drive to a dedicated host for hosting the Music Files which is connected directly into the switch which these machines are connected to (home Dir's created on the fly using Samba). Each user then has there own private area for saving music work. From any domain PC the app can be run to map against the Music server if a requirement is needed to access these files from anywhere other then the Music Tech suite (which is rare). Then in a seperate room we have 7 21.5" Imacs for A-level use with very similar setups to the machines mentioned above but slightly different software. We also have a couple of Mac Pro's in the radio room/Recording studio.

[Chuckster]

Hi, thanks for your detailed reply. I am very surprised I managed to cobble together my post with very little mistakes as I was talking with someone whilst writing. Apologies about not mentioning the sw we would be using. We are a primary school and these systems would be primarily for KeyStage 1 so you are talking the younger kids up to around year 2.

The main apps they use are 2Simple packages which I am sure you can obtain Mac copies of, lots of online resources etc.

I am convinced the Apple hardware lasts alot longer than counterparts both in build and usability (if you buy a decent system it tends to still run very well years after a Windows based system).

 

I have been very impressed with the remote control software for Macs. I have been using one called Remote Desktop - lovely application, runs very smooth even on my very slow out in the sticks country internet connection.

 

Thanks again for your help

 

Apologies in advance but, this sounds like a colossal waste of tax payers' money, if all you're doing is using 2Simple software.

 

I have all the 2Simple software installed on all the school's curriculum machines and not one title has given me any problems. All our workstations are 5 years old (Intel Dual-Core 2GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, onboard graphics, onboard 1Gbit NIC etc). What's more, these workstations have taken a serious battering over the years and they continue doing so.

 

The price you'll be paying for these flashy gizmos could probably kit out 2 primary schools if they were Windows based machines. RE remote control software, you could use LanView with Ultra VNC - which is free! Failing that, there is teamviewer, logmein et al.

 

If this was for a high school then I can understand where you're coming from, but I think a complete refit of a primary school with Apple products is a major overkill.

 

Just my two pence.

[glennda]

Apologies in advance but, this sounds like a colossal waste of tax payers' money, if all you're doing is using 2Simple software.

 

I have all the 2Simple software installed on all the school's curriculum machines and not one title has given me any problems. All our workstations are 5 years old (Intel Dual-Core 2GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD, onboard graphics, onboard 1Gbit NIC etc). What's more, these workstations have taken a serious battering over the years and they continue doing so.

 

The price you'll be paying for these flashy gizmos could probably kit out 2 primary schools if they were Windows based machines. RE remote control software, you could use LanView with Ultra VNC - which is free! Failing that, there is teamviewer, logmein et al.

 

If this was for a high school then I can understand where you're coming from, but I think a complete refit of a primary school with Apple products is a major overkill.

 

Just my two pence.

 

 

Didn't realise it was primary - yes complete waste of money if you are looking at Macs. Yes they have there advantages but not for KS1!!

[Chuckster]

Forgot to add, we have 6 x MacBook Pro's and 4 iMacs. We use them primariy for Photoshop, Comic Life and iLife (iPhoto, Garageband, iMovie etc)

[tom_pearson]

Not too sure why you are choosing the Mac route if you're only using primary applications...

 

However, out of the software listed above I've only had issues with iPhoto (as others have stated) not playing when using a non-Mac formatted volume to store iPhoto library's. This, plus issues I've had with Logic has meant I've had to force local home directories, then redirect 'Pictures' and 'Music' to a thunderbolt RAID hanging off a Lion Mac Mini Server. User's authenticate with AD, but are managed through OD.

 

The Apple network has cost the school ALOT of money to get to it's current state, and hasn't come without lot's of problems. Mainly due to integration with Windows.

 

If I was in your situation I'd be very cautious about choosing Mac's unless there was a serious demand for them.

 

Good luck either way though!

[Roberto]

Given Apple's recent attitudes to enterprise computing, I would seriously question the wisdom of moving towards OSX at this stage of things, in fact we've got a 70-odd mac deployment as part of our network which we're planning to move away from when it comes time to renew that hardware.

 

Sorry to be so negative, I've driven hard at getting macs adopted and usable in education in the past, and we've done great things here with art/media departments and adobe creative suite plus final cut pro on the mac, but I wouldn't recommend it now, especially if the jobs you're looking to do are reasonably do-able on other platforms.