Soulfish

Thought I'd chip into this thread. First things first there are only two forms of connectivity for SANs - Fibre Channel or Ethernet. SAS is only used for DAS setups (Direct Attached Storage). If you don't have an existing Fibre Channel setup (which you don't since your asking about it) it's easier and cheaper to go for iSCSI/Ethernet based connectivity. If you've made do without fibre channel until now, you won't miss it and you'll save the cost of Fibre Channel HBAs, and Fibre Channel switches/directors. As others have discussed there is the possibility of utilising a converged network infrastructure (Fibre Channel Over Ethernet or FCoE), but unless your running something like the nice fancy Cisco Nexus range of switches I doubt your kit is capable . So iSCSI/Ethernet SANs. This tends to be where a large segment of the SAN market is heading. Having tendered for a new (large) SAN this summer, and running two different SANs here I've had the pleasure of looking at virtually every manufacturer on the market (IBM, Hitachi, Sun/Oracle, EMC, NetApp, HP EVAs, Dell, Dell Equalogic, Lefthand (HP P4000), Pillar, Huawei/Symantec, 3Par, Compellent and lots of others). As mentioned previously a unified storage system combining NAS and SAN functionality gives you the best of both worlds. You get to serve files directly from the device, while still getting to do block level access as well. There are lots of other nice things you can look for as well - automated tiering between storage tiers (moving commonly access files to fast disks, least access files to slow disk), snapshotting (allowing for quick access to previous versions), replication and finally the use of SSDs/Cache to speed everything up. Like lots of other people I'm a big fan of the Oracle S7000 series of SANs. They're reasonably priced with a very easy to use GUI and good performance. The best thing you can do in this market place however is play the manufacturers off against each other. Unless your getting 60+% off list you haven't got a good enough deal . Dell have just bought Compellent, and EMC have just launched a new unified product targeted at SMBs so there are some very good deals available. We currently run a Sun/Oracle 7110 and an EMC Celerra NS-480. Both are connected to a physically separate storage network that consists of 2 x Juniper EX2500 24-port 10GbE switches. Each server then has an Intel X520-DA2 10GbE card and we use direct-attached twinax SFP+ cables from the servers to the switches. The Sun 7110 has around 2tb raw while the EMC has around 120tb raw. Unless your pushing lots and lots of data then a good gigabit switch would be fine for most SANs. A separate switch is preferable, but a VLAN on your core switch can also work. Finally I know you mentioned at the start about buying the SAN/disk shelves part empty and filling them up later. If you can buy any disk shelves full. They'll be a lot lot cheaper to buy at the start then to fill later, and unfortunately you can't just buy the disks and put them in yourself. I don't know of any vendor that allows you to buy the disk caddies and some of them use fibre channel disks which makes it even harder! If you've got any questions feel free to ask or drop me a PM

300 units normally relates to the total order. Each thing you add has a unit cost associated with it. I can't remember what the unit costs were for the various things you could order under schools agreement as we were always well over the 100 unit minimum!

You'd be correct in your thinking . Our current schools agreement costs for the Desktop Pack is around £25-26/pc, while Desktop Pack w/Ent CAL is around £31/pc. From what I've heard (and from seeing Campus pricing which is FTE) we can expect that pricing to likely double, although it could be even higher.

12gb it is . Any recommendations on PSTN gateways?

Ahhha. I thought I remembered you mentioning something about realtime encoding and VMs for lync/OCS not working so well . May need to have a play with a couple of options, as with the latest Dell R715s we've deployed (24 cores ) it may be feasible to dedicate 4-cores. Although 2 x physical standard edition servers is looking the most likely option at the moment. Any idea what sort of spec we should be looking for? MS seem to indicate 4-cores + 16gb ram for each standard edition server to support 2k users and 100 people conferencing simultaneously. We'd only have 100 users, so I'm thinking 4-cores + 4-8gb RAM?

On a schools agreement a SCCM w/SQL server license (includes the license for SQL, if you already have a SQL cluster that you could use you could get the cheaper license) was around £60-65/year.

We're just looking at replacing our 15-20 year old Rhapsody phone system, and we're liking MS Lync at the moment. I know a few of you are running Lync, so I was just wondering what your setups are? What are you using for a PSTN gateway? Are you just using a single standard server, or have you setup multiple pools to allow for some HA? Currently we're looking at possibly a Audiocodes Mediant 1000 PSTN gateway together with either a single standard server (+ edge, archiving etc) or a front end pool to give us some form of HA. Servers would be running as VMs. Phone wise we're looking at using a combination of Polycom CX300's, CX500's, CX600's and some wireless Jabra/Polycom headsets for admin staff and the soft client for lots of staff

You don't actually need a server license for Forefront Endpoint Protection since it integrates into SCCM to deploy clients/updates and manage all reporting. So you only need the SCCM server license . It's what we've moved to this summer.

It always has. One of the reasons we use the Enterprise CAL pack here . We get Forefront client anti-virus, server anti-virus and online Exchange spam/AV filtering

Currently 32bit due to some issues with 64bit compatibility when we rolled out. When we reimage this summer we'll probably look at moving to 64bit site wide

Will have to do that - we were playing with it here just before Christmas. Then the snow + Christmas happened so haven't had a chance to play with it properly. We're still using it via the development web server as well. Hmmm I'm now very tempted to get back into writing python and see if I can knock something together Time to go read up on how Mediacore/ffmpeg work

We've recently been setting it up here as well. Haven't had much of a chance to play with it though unfortunately. It does seem like a great piece of software, albeit not the easiest to install from behind a proxy . The lack of auto-transcoding is a shame, but it does seem that it's on the development roadmap so hopefully it won't be too long before its included.

I'd love to come Sessions on System Center products (SCCM etc) and/or Microsoft Lync would be my suggestions

Using XenServer Enterprise here very successfully. Great product at a great price. For comparable features from VMWare it would have cost us 4 x the cost in initial licenses . Unfortunately Hyper-V didn't have some of the features we wanted at the time. The latest release of Hyper-V seems better, but not as good/easy to use as the free XenServer product. Any questions about XenServer feel free to ask

You can manually go through and remove the excess account, so you'd only need a 1000 user license for instance . It's probably a load of excess student accounts and/or service accounts that papercut has found in AD. We get papercut to only sync specific OUs within AD because of that

About 45-50 printers (various colour lasers, mono lasers and inkjet printers - most are now Ricohs on a cost per page scheme) and 3 Ricoh photocopiers.

We rewired our entire school this summer. We put in one new network cabinet (for a total of 10 - one on each floor, plus the server room), but kept the current network cabinets in their existing locations. In total we put in approximately 1300 network points, one 8-core fibre run and replaced all network cabinets for a cost of around £60,000. We already had 8-core OM3 fibre runs to all the other network cabinets. Unfortunately the distances were to great for us to even think of running it all back to a single point, however if we had any spare hidey holes/large cupboards it would have been good to have been able to relocate some cabinets to them. Unfortunately we don't so everything still wall mounted in various classrooms.

We've got a Citrix XenDesktop 100-seat deployment using Wyse Xeniths. It's been built to scale out to possibly 1000+ seats (1-1 computing!), and have found the system to be quite good. Do make sure that you know what can/can't run off of a virtual desktop. I'd also look at virtualising some of your applications using XenApp/Terminal Services to help relieve the load from the virtual desktops. We currently run the system on 4 x Dell R715's each with 2 x AMD 6176SE 12-core CPUs (24 cores ) and 64 GB RAM. Each windows 7 desktop is allocated 2 vCPUs and 1.5gb RAM We opted for XenDesktop over View as it worked better for our environment at a cheaper price. Any questions just let me know

PM sent

Look out for any minimums (and maximums!) as they could cripple you. Also double check to make sure that there aren't any costs for the devices. If your a state school then Ricoh, Konica etc all have some very very very good pricing under the Catalyst/Buying Solutions (Buying Solutions - The National Procurement Partner for UK Public Services) framework which I've yet to have beaten by a commercial supplier.

I've found the last couple of ESCC NM forums to be quite good, with some good discussions of problems/concerns. Last meeting it was good to talk to others about county internet provision vs commercial providers and broach the subject of cancelling with various people at county

1050 students, 75 staff, 2 IT staff although we have a vacancy that we'll be looking to fill soon to take us back up to 3 IT staff.

Druva and Vembu both have the option of backing up to a local NAS as well as replicating to a local or remote NAS. The cloud based stuff is because a lot of online backup providers use their software and rebrand it as their own

5 but the forum tells me I've got to make my post longer!

+1 for Smoothwall. We looked at Bloxx, Smoothwall and Websense and not only were Smoothwall cheaper they were the better product for us