Soulfish

If anyone is looking for alternative SIMS/Moodle integration systems I can recommend SchoolsICT and their ZiLink product (ZiLink | enabling 21st century learning). We use it here and it's been great, and they're a great company to work with

We have a few Parasync 20's. Not had any problems with them, and they just seem to work for us

Well I've just looked out my window and we've got a good 4-5 inches of snow sitting outside. Now the question is, is it staying until tomorrow or melting??

Don't worry I'm hoping to get the photos online today

One of the reasons I love Crashplan+. Paid for a stupidly long unlimited subscription when they did a special offer a couple of years ago and it's been brilliant. Syncing files (and keep revisions of files for as long as you want) to the cloud and any local backup repositories I want is great

We have 2 x 3hr periods a day with a 30 min tutor period between them. Lunch and break are staggered within the two periods due to having a small site. House assemblies are held Mon - Thurs during the tutor time in the middle of the day. We only have whole school assemblies at the end of term, and we can only fit them in because we're currently only two year groups big. No singing involved during our assemblies, but lots of AV equipment!

We do have two new XServes here that we use, but they're bound to our AD domain along with all the macs.

Big fan of Aerohive here. Just works, and no controller to worry about

Used it both here and at my last school. Great product. Here we also have it integrating with our biometric biostore database (used for cashless catering and eclipse library system) so that its nice and simple for staff to login.

Its the new name for the Opalis range of automation tools that MS bought a couple of years ago. If you license SMSD you got SA rights to use the Opalis suite, but I never did get around to playing with it! Looked quite good if you wanted to automated a load of common tasks or workflows.

It depends is the answer. You can license on a concurrent user scheme, or on a per named user scheme. Although it also depends on which edition of XenApp your licensing as only certain editions can use the different licensing models. See Citrix Systems » Application virtualization, virtual applications - Licensing with XenApp for more info. There's also a special campus licensing scheme for education, but it's based around XenDesktop. You have to license all users with a minimum user count of 1,000. You are then covered for full use of XenApp/XenDesktop (and XenServer to host XenDesktop VDI instances). That's a yearly licensing scheme and for the Enterprise edition is around £13-15 a seat.

System Centre Server Management Suite Data Centre Licence and SA Pack cost us around £30/CPU (licensed as other datacenter products). But that only covers the server ML licenses, with the enterprise cal pack covering most of the client CALs. You do get the full server license of SCVMM thrown in if you buy the SMSD pack, but you still need server licenses for SCCM/SCOM etc. See https://partner.microsoft.com/40107621

We've got a Fluke NetTool II and it's a great tester, problem is it's not cheap! Slightly cheaper options would be the JDSU range (formely Test Um) - something like the Validator/Validator Pro however all of these are still £1,000 - 3,000 dependant on which options you go for!

Currently installing BES onto a VM and looking into integrating Lync 2010 with our existing Cisco phone system. Also looking at moving SIMS into a new XenApp 6.5 farm.

Dell R210 II is the dell half-depth rack server. Used them before, and was fairly happy with it. Quite compact and plenty of options available . Other than that you're looking at Supermicro units from Broadberry/Rackservers.com/SGI. Dell will probably be able to beat their pricing though

Of course! Drop me a PM and we can talk about dates To everyone after photos I'll spend some time tomorrow gathering them so you can all see what was shown on the tour

If you can buy and get the unit shipped before the end of this month then Dell by a long shot. Dells end of financial year is the end of this month, and you can get huuuuuuuge discounts (not unusual to find them selling at cost in the last week for a big enough deal ) if you deal with Dell direct. Get yourself a good Dell internal/external account management team and I've also found that HP just can't compete, and that's with special edu bid pricing with HP knowing the sort of price Dell were offering.

Don't worry we have plenty of photos to help jog your memory

Had a great week at BETT, but now I'm utterly exhausted. Great to put some new names to faces and meetup with everyone I've met before Looking forward to BETT 2013!

Speed wise 8gb fc and 10gb ethernet are pretty similar. If you don't currently have a fibre infrastructure (or your looking to upgrade to 8gb) I wouldn't bother. 16gb fc is now on the market, but 10gb ethernet is a much longer time investment. Tbh most large companies are looking at converged infrastructures and FCoE. Most of the new and innovative SAN products are now ethernet/iscsi/NFS based SANs. Products from NetApp, HP Lefthand, Dell Equalogic/Dell Compellent as well as the new smaller companies (Coraid, Kaminario, Tintri, Whiptail, Nimble etc) all fully support ethernet/iscsi. Personally I don't believe you need fibre channel any longer, and actually as Synack says 10gb ethernet gives you the ability to use it for other things should you need to.

@elsiegee40 I'm glad you enjoyed the tour! I'm just sorry it was so rushed @ihaveaproblem - there were a couple of people taking photos, but I'm also going to be uploading some of our photos here and to the server room photos thread next week

For those that are interested I'm planning a quick tour of the Academy I work at and its IT facilities after BETT on Friday. We'd probably be leaving from the Edugeek BETT stand at 5pm-6pm. If you want to tag along let me know as ideally I need to give security advance warning of numbers

Sounds like some form of Intel management interface (Intel AMT - Intel Active Management Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Usually found in most enterprise gear these days by HP/Dell/Lenovo etc

Monday during the day and then Tuesday through to Saturday/Sun morning

I get to stay in bed today, but only because I've got flu