Soulfish

I do know of schools that claim 100% uptime, but they also have very very large IT budgets and the backing to ensure that they have spares on hand for most things. I think the only realistic thing to do is to be honest, set out the true cost of a 100% (or 99.999%) uptime environment and then the cost of environments that get close to that with a few less 0's at the end of the price. Make sure you show them why it's impossible to expect the network to be perfect with a less than pefect budget. I know that my last school IT had been heavily underfunded for many many years to the point where everything was being held together with gaffer tape. In the end I turned round to the head and the governors and showed them that they were expecting me to keep £1 - 2 million worth of IT equipment running without any money, when the majority of that equipment only had 3-5 year life spans and we were already past that with 80% of the kit. When asked what alternatives they had to investing money I was honest and told them the alternative was to remove IT suites and interactive whiteboards until we kit a level of IT penetration that suited the budget they had in mind. That shocked them a little, but the next day I had the green light for massive IT investment over five years. I think many schools are still treating IT as something that can be strung along on a shoestring and as you point out there is an ever greater reliance on IT systems to the point where it's just not fesable to underfund to the levels that are sometimes talked about. I hope my above ramblings helped a little

Hopefully once the school starts filling up we'll be recruiting for more staff I'm actually really enjoying it here . Never a dull day!

Hi All, We're now advertising for the post of IT Systems Analyst at my new school in Hammersmith, London. The academy is a brand new academy set to open in September, with the building being handed over at the start of June. There's lots going on and as a new school you'd be joining a very small team of people at a very hectic time as we move on towards September. Salary is up to 25k (although more may be available for exceptional candidates). More info and job packs etc can be found at Hammersmith Academy - If anyones got any questions feel free to post or drop me a PM and I'll do my best to answer them

Interesting. Think I'll signup as well! I'm actually doing a VMWare training course with them in a couple of weeks so if I don't hear anymore before then I'll try and find out then

Eve was a great game that took up a lot of my time from 2001 - 2004 and most of my life in the alpha/beta tests and the first few months after launch . I can still remember the time they decided to fly a titan into the alpha-test system just to see what we'd all do . That was a bit of a lag fest! Unfortunately I haven't played in years, but with all the changes and improvements since I last played I really should get back into it - only problem I have is that I can't remember the password into my old account!

+1 for that level of printing you need to be using a contract printer. You'll get a lower cost per page and machine maintenance included in the cost.

I've implemented a few virtual solutions now and one thing I will say is that until you get to the HP XP range/EMC Symmetrix (£££££££££) no SAN is 100% foolproof, and even with their hefty price tags those bits of kit can still fallover. Now there are various ways of mitigating this. If you have the cash a second SAN is one, alternatively good backup procedures and local storage could get you back online in a few hours. I will say that I've seen MSAs taken out entirely with all data lost before and heard of EVAs have similar happen. OK it's not common, but it is possible . I've used both XenServer and VMWare. XenServer is great and I love the product, but VMWare has more features at the high end but you're paying a lot more for the privilege. My previous solution was based around XenServer, a Sun 7110, an EMC Celerra NS-480 and 4 x Sun Fire x4150's (32gb each, dual quad core) and another 4 x Dell R715s for VDI (64gb each, dual 12-core). The solution that's going into my new school is 3 x HP 380's (64gb each, dual 6-core) and a HP EVA6400 based around VMWare. The VM hosts don't have any local storage. VMWare will be boot from SAN, so we'll also be running a separate physical DC. It's all swings and roundabouts on the kit you buy, but if you do go for a SAN/NAS don't scrimp. As others have said it becomes the core of your network and a single point of failure. I would also for the reasons outlined by others be running a DC outside of the SAN based storage. If you do that as a separate physical DC or locally to one of the VM-Host boxes just make sure that you can bring it online first .

If your public sector based (ie most schools) then have a look at one of the buying solutions contracts with the major networks. Through them you'll get discounted pricing and they'll invoice/accept purchase orders.

Happy birthday

Thats the impression I was getting on Extricoms system. Great for roaming, but other than that it seems about the same as everyone else. We're in quite a lucky position being a greenfield site. While financial concerns are certainly still important above all we want a solution that will work, which is why I'm trying to find out what experiences people have of high density wireless in inner city environments. If that means we don't opt for the cheapest solution then that's what we'll do, however we don't have unlimited budgets . Out of interest do you have any preferences when it comes to inner-city working and high densities? Feel free to PM if you prefer Cisco is just £££££££. Extricom quote I've been passed is actually alot lot less than I was expecting, but I need to sit down with them and figure out what they've actually specced it to since we want the system to support upto 1-2k devices! Ruckus is still an option, but its dependent on a few other things as well. A wireless shootout would be great. Getting in Ruckus, Meru, Extricom, Xirrus, Aruba and whoever else into an environment of our choosing and seeing how it performs across lots of devices/ranges etc would be great. Just a lot of work.

Cheers that would be useful - I'll drop you a PM . Out of interest did you have meru or extricom in your wifi shootout you did a while back? From what I've seen they're similar technology wise to extricom - both are based around the single channel idea. Really need to speak to people that are successfully doing high-levels of wifi usage/roaming to see what solutions they've used and how they've worked for them

And I imagine they'll be a lot more. I did look at the majority of those threads, but I was looking for actual current users of the system and if anyone had direct experience of both Extricom and other vendors and how they found them.

We're currently looking at managed wireless systems for a new school. Unfortunately the building hasn't been completed yet, but we need to select a managed wireless system. I've used Ruckus before and found it quite good, but I was wondering what everyone thought of Extricom? Has anyone got any experience of them, and if their "blanket wireless" system actually works? It's whats currently being suggested by the network infrastructure company. On a related note has anyone tried Ruckus and Extricom? Or even Extricom against Xirrus, meru or aruba? The hardwired nature of the Extricom solution isn't a problem for us because of how the buildings been cabled, but we need to select the best solution for us.

I've recently made the move from NM to IT Director. As everyone's said there is much more involvement with the entire management team and decisions that are made. I'll let you know for sure what the differences are once I've done the role for a few months!

SCCM and MDT is the route I'd go down. Gives greater flexability, and is a nice extra to have

We've got an EMC SAN - a EMC Celerra NS-480 to be exact. We have licenses for NFS, iSCSI, CIFS and FAST Cache on ours. EMCs price came in way below everyone else for much more stuff when we went out for tender last year. We had one of the first implementations world wide of Fast Cache and the new Unisphere single-pane-of-glass management interface. Unisphere (its java/web based) is fairly easy to use to mange the Celerra/Clariion. Doesn't have all of the fancy analytics of an S7000 (we also have one of those ) but gives some nice information anyway. My biggest bug bear is how complex the integration between Celerra and Clariion is, since you actually get both when buying a Celerra. I understand that the VNX/VNXe range has made this a lot simpler and provides a single box essentially. EMC dedupe is a little different from other vendors though, as is their snapshotting. I'd have a read up on both of those areas and see if it matters a great deal to you. All implementations have their pros/cons and I find EMCs implementations a little restrictive at times but their workable solutions at least and we get 80% dedupe savings on our fileshares so it certainly works . Whatever you do though make sure to get all licenses you think you may need included, and try and get as many years support as you can. We have 4 years support on ours (4th year was thrown in free ) and its been pretty good. They actually keep pestering me to get an update run on the system for an issue we're not even experiencing atm (we're not at 90%+ utilisation levels yet!). Any questions just ask

For anyone that's interested in either of these roles just a reminder that the closing date is this Thursday

As gshaw says there isn't a SCCM 2010 . v.Next (SCCM 2012) is supposed to be released later this year I believe.

For us we have a pool of 4 physical servers that host all of our VMs. Each of these is dual processor, so we have 8 x SMSD licenses together with the Enterprise CAL pack to cover all of our system centre needs. If you've got other physical servers that aren't running VMs its probably cheaper and less hassle to just get them a SMSD license (for each physical processor) as well. We then just purchase server licenses for SCCM, SCOM etc.

I'm currently (1 week left to go!) managed by the business manager (I'm the network manager). In my new role (Director of IT) I'm managed by the finance director. I've always tried to make the distinction between ICT as a subject and IT as a service. The two interact, but are very different beasts and IT as a service is there for every subject and part of the school not just ICT.

If your managing servers you also need server ML licenses. Easiest way to get them (if you're running lots of VMs) is to get the System Center Management Suite Datacentre license. That's done per CPU, but gives you unlimited management licenses for the System Centre suite of products (SCCM, SCOM, DPM, SCVMM etc), gives you access to the MS Opalis automation tools and gives you the server licenses for SCVMM + DPM. List price is 2.5k USD per CPU, pricing under a schools agreement was around £20-30/CPU

Not ideal, but as jamesreedersmith says use some form of small switch.

I'll be giving someone a shout in a bit - need to find out who my account manager would be for my new region

I'm moving to a new school in the next few weeks and currently it looks like we may be using a Sophos web filtering system as that's whats been specced. Personally I'm a big fan of Smoothwall, but I wanted to see what users of the Sophos solution thought? Have any of you got macs bound to both AD/OD and how are you finding browsing via the macs? Ideally I'd like full integration, but I'm not sure if the sophos solution is able to deliver that.

They're probably talking about News | DriverPacks.net. We use them as the drivers of last resort for our SCCM deployments, when the standard Dell/HP drivers have all been tried based on model number. Works quite well for the few random machines we still have kicking about!