Soulfish

Currently have two SANs. A Sun/Oracle 7110 and an EMC Celerra NS-480. Both are good units and both have (touch wood) been reliable. The EMC is a new purchase after a tender was put out for a new SAN. EMC offered a much larger system for a lower cost than everyone else, so in that respect it's been good value. The 7110 was great value since it was half price . The support on both has been good, although its definitely needed on the EMC unit. It's so complex that I'm very glad it was installed and setup by EMC. Didn't help that we had one of the first live installs of their new FastCache technology in the world and it'd been specced up wrong by them! I'd probably buy a Sun/Oracle unit again once it was very clear what was going on and after they've ironed out the issues with Sun/oracle integration. EMC would depending on price, and what they were giving compared to everyone else . From the three that you've listed I'd be careful with the FAS2020. It's a very poor performing product (just ask Duke on here about his ) as it's a cut down box without the horsepower to really make use of alot of Netapps nice features. You really need a FAS2040 (which is actually newer and faster than a FAS2050) to start to get anywhere. The HP P4000's and Equallogic units are both nice, and I know if we had our stuff replaced with them here I'd still be pretty happy using them .

As teejay says System Center (although I think some of the larger primaries are using SCE?) would be good. Alternatively how about a 45 minute treasure hunt around the MS offices?

I'll drop you a PM. We're based in East Sussex and are running XenDesktop 5 here

Same as Rydra and Webman. I work in a school as a NM and it's generally enjoyable but can be frustrating at times. Unfortunately there's no where else to go, so I'm looking elsewhere for other challenges. I'd be happy to work in education again or privately but it would have to be the right position, at the right time with the right environment and pay for me to move

Well there are switches to work to every budget in HPs range, but if you stuck another 0 on the end of that you might be able to buy one of our edge Juniper switches at list price! You don't want to see the cost of the core switches From what you've said it sounds like you've got 3 cabinets connected back to the core which also has its own switches. I'd be wanting to look at bonding those redundant fibre links using LACP, and getting a couple of copper connections to each of your other switches at the core. Unfortunately that doesn't come cheap. Even the HP fibre modules are around £150/each so you can rapidly burn through your budget . I've had a quick look at some of the E and V series of HP switches and for the minimum that you'd be after (3 single fibre connections, around 40ish copper ports) you'd be wanting something like the E2810-48G or a V1910-48G. The E is the nicer switch with better warranty, but costs around £1300. The V is around £500, so you could probably get but only comes with a 3 year warranty.

How is your current network physically laid out, and how much do you have to spend? . It really is an open book and pricing could be very little or it could be huge amounts. The number of fibre connections you need (if any) is one area that will add to the cost, as well how many ports you'd need in total at the core.

+1. The 5% calculations for print toner life span we found useless. I did have a great spreadsheet from Konica that had % coverage for CMYK for 4 different types of document that you could use to calculate actual costs per page. Based on that (and before we moved to a managed print contract and started using papercut) our mono print costs could be up to 10p/page and colour in excess of 60p/page! I'll see if I can dig out the spreadsheet and values that Konica suggested as accurate % coverage levels.

Staff are 2.5p/mono sheet, 15p/colour sheet. Set at that rate due to cost for photocopying (we use papercut MF so integrate it with our copiers as well) including the paper, and to discourage colour printing. Students are likely to be charged 4-5p/sheet mono and 25p/sheet colour, but we're still working on that

I'd say the same has happened here. The ICT investment that has been made over the last 2 years really has gone towards giving staff and students access to resources that they're now using every day. Our student netbooks/laptops are in use every day by the Science and English departments (only departments that have them), site wide wireless is used by a number of staff, IWBs do get used by a large percentage of staff (not everyone, but virtually everyone tries to use them!), and our most recent purchase a suite of Apple Macs for the music department is now being used before school, during lunch and after school by students actually wanting to do extra work outside of lessons. Not everything is rosy, I'm sure we've wasted our own share of money on software and gadgets that aren't used but whenever we (as an IT department) are involved I do try and ensure that we're only buying software and equipment that is good value for money and is going to get used.

With virtual servers its the physical hardware that a windows OS license is tied to, not the VM. For instance in your example you couldn't just have 12 (6 VMs, 4 physical VM boxes, 2 physicals) standard windows licenses and migrate the servers around . What you could do is buy Windows Enterprise, which enables the host server and 4 VMs to run windows. If you're ever going to be running any extra servers, or there's the possibility of more than 4 VMs/server I'd go for Windows Datacenter licenses. Cost is the same as Enterprise normally, but you have to purchase per processor so for a 2 CPU (not cores, but physical CPUs) box you'd need 2 Datacenter licenses.

You'll be wanting to look at Microsoft Windows Enterprise: Operating system virtualization, but essentially no it's not quite that simple . There are a few other MS licenses that you'd also need that soon push the price up!

From what I understand Mode A should be more prevalent - certainly anything supporting gigabit speeds and PoE seems to use Mode A (Power over Ethernet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

I'd be interested in hearing what happens around the 300point mark. Our schools agreement is huge (450-500 machines and lots of addons = around £19k/year!) so I suspect we'll be at or above the 300 point mark

Personally I use backblaze.com to backup all of my personal data. At $50/year for unlimited storage (I have around 500gb backed up ) it's a godsend. The initial upload takes a while (mine took months!), but now its there the only things that get uploaded are changes and new files. Hell of a lot easier than worrying about building your own backup infrastructure at home and worrying about loosing all those photos and documents should you have a fire/break in. Also cheaper on the electricity . Failing that why not looking into something like cobian backup (free) which should work fine for basic files?

Number of IT staff:2 Number of students:1050 Number of IT teachers (IT only): 1 Number of staff (whole school): 90 Number of computers: 500 School Funding: State School Type: Secondary

I know how you feel . I'd love to be able to attend a Richard Stallman talk.

Well with IPv6 the idea is that every device has a publicly accessible IP . No more NAT! All of our infrastructure has been designed with IPv6 support in mind, but need to check with our LEA what their plans are to support it.

Juniper switches as nephilim says. We've got a load here and they're great . If you've got the cash EX8208's/EX8216's with appropriate modules and when it's available the XRE200 to combine them all into working as one big switch. That way you get redundancy at the chassis level, and then redundant chassis. Of course it also takes lots of £££££££. A cheaper alternative would be running EX4200's (or EX4500's if you need lots of 10GbE!) in a virtual chassis. Just ensure that whatever your connecting up has two+ links plugged into separate physical EX's, bonded in someway. The virtual chassis makes the separate switches work as one so if one fails it won't be a problem. They're also great switches to work with. Within our network we run two EX8208's at the core (not in a virtual chassis unfortunately!) that are interconnected. All edge switch stacks (EX4200's in a virtual chassis config) connect back to both EX8208's in the core. If one of the cores fails, or if one of the redundant fibre paths fails everything fails over to the alternatives. Quite nice to watch it all working as you pull the power/reboot and see everything still work

Well having totally redesigned and reimplemented our network this summer we did something similar (although it was a total refresh of virtually everything ). Just from the sizes you've indicated I'd say 50k is much too low. I'd also be wanting to run at least 8-core OM3 fibre to each satellite cabinet from the core unless it really wasn't feasible to do that and a Core - Distribution - Edge layout was the only option. As a guestimate I'd probably say something in the 100k-150k region is what you'd be looking at. Although if their infrastructure is a bad as you say it may be worth looking at future proofing the install now and seeing how much to recable the entire set of buildings and/or replace the switching infrastructure. Of course then prices start going up and up

We've got a pretty heavily used Moodle install (1100 students, 100 staff) and run it entirely from 2 VMs. 1 for Apache, 1 for MySQL. Took the decision to split them when we first deployed so it'd be easier to expand in the future . Both run 2 vCPUs and 4gb RAM with CentOS as the OS of choice. Performance is fast and snappy. You could probably run it quite happily on a single Linux VM with 4gb RAM, or a very basic Dell R210/HP DL160 if needed.

+1 on using a SAN/NAS unified system for file sharing. We've got a 7110 and an EMC Celerra NS-480 and both are great at file sharing, with full shadow copy support

As SYNACK and Duke have already said - don't go with FC . It's not the same sort of fibre network as ethernet based fibre - it runs its own set of protocols and will need you to learn all about FC switching and zoning. As Duke mentions you really want a unified device. Look at something like the Oracle S7000 series, any of the Netapps (make sure they give you licenses for everything up front though!), or the new range of EMC VNXe's/VNX's (depending on how big you need to be). You could also look at something like the HP P4000 series with a HP NAS gateway, or a Dell Equalogic with a Dell NAS gateway. The NAS gateway uses the underlying block level (SAN) storage and presents it as file level CIFS/NFS/whatever (NAS) storage. You may also want to look at Dells Compellent offerings. I know from when I looked at Compellent before they were bought by Dell they had a very interesting product (essentially block based, although you could get a NAS head based on their own customised Nexenta build), but they had a 100% support center satisfaction rating and certainly everyone I spoke to rated their support team very highly. How that'll change now they're a part of Dell is anyones guess

I'd recommend something like Amazon S3. Large company and if your backup software can't work directly with S3 (lots can now) then you could use something like JungleDisk to get just the data you need into the cloud

+1 I'd be looking into rfid ID badges and door access control systems. I know from looking in the past a lot of door access systems seem to have this functionality built in

Coraid were interesting, but I was concerned by the ATAoE driver support in XenServer/VMWare. They certainly put forward a compelling case but the uncertainty of a small company always being able around to provide driver updates meant we ended up looking elsewhere. It may very well be a SAN, but SAS connectivity makes it more like a DAS . You can't network SAS connections, only directly connect from the SAS port to the server (well some blade chassis provide "SAS network modules", but thats more to expose internal blades to SAS connectivity). It may be that IBM have a SAN solution that is also able to provide SAS connections (as well as other more typical forms of SAN connectivity) to act more like a DAS but I'd say it's a pretty unusual setup. SAS connectivity is pretty cheap, but is unable to scale as high as fibre or ethernet and has the disadvantage that if your servers aren't within a short distance of your SAN/DAS you're unable to connect to it.