Soulfish

Have a look at Onsite Backup Software for Network based Disk to Disk Backup for SMBs and ROBOs and Advanced Data Protection Solutions for Enterprises - Remote Backup, Deduplication, Continuous Data Protection (CDP). We're currently looking at Vembu Storegrid for all of our backup needs

You can run ZFS on anything that supports Solaris/FreeBSD. The Linux implementation isn't great, but the FreeBSD implementation is meant to be quite good if you don't want to run Solaris. If you want a nice easy to use distro with ZFS support built in have a look a Nexenta. Couple of options there if you have less than 12tb storage then Nexenta Community Edition comes with the same GUI as the Nexenta commercial product I believe and is free to run. If you have more than 12tb you can use Nexenta Core which is free for any amount of storage but doesn't have a GUI. If you need a GUI you could always use napp-it.org

El Toro was a bit of a let down unfortunately - even with my mammoth platter of meat . If anyone's looking for an excellent steak restaurant in central London I can definitely recommend Goodman Steak Restaurant Mayfair City London A bit on the expensive side, but some of the best steak I've ever had the pleasure of eating, cooked to perfection

Having been accosted by them while walking about with Robk I think we both agreed that they left a very bad taste in our mouths with their sales tactics! Yas was great - really enjoyed the whole meal there Looking forward to it already

Sounds like your running ThinOS or its a Wyse Xenith zero client. There are a couple of DHCP options you have to setup that points the client to a file server. Normally you just use the same website as the Citrix farm. You have to setup a specific file structure and add a couple of MIME types to allow .ini files to be downloaded. Then you create a wnos.ini file (wyse have some examples on their website) that points the device to the correct farm and it should just work . The wyse xenith guide (can get it here CTX125881 - Wyse Xenith Administrators Guide - Citrix Knowledge Center) has some info in the chapter "A Central Configuration: Automating Updates and Configurations". Should be the same info for both a Xenith and a ThinOS client.

That sounds like Bexhill High School **. They decided to try something different for their new build (opened in October 2010). Pods instead of classrooms with 90 students, and plasma tvs instead of whiteboards as the classrooms/pods aren't fixed layout.

Raid 10 is faster than Raid 5, however Raid 5 gives greater capacity for the same number of disks. For most general workloads utilising a modern controller with a decent cache size and good RAID algorithm implementation RAID 5 is (now) pretty similar to RAID 10, until you start hitting large numbers of random writes. For that reason I'd normally go for RAID 5 (or 6 which is just 5 with an extra parity drive) unless you needed the performance, or could afford to run RAID 10. For our latest SAN we run a mixture of RAID 1, RAID 10 and RAID 6 depending on the storage tier. For tier 0 (SSDs) we run in RAID 1 since they're already pretty fast and we need the redundancy, for tier 1 (15k SAS drives) we run in RAID 10 to get the best performance, and for tier 2 (7.2k SATA disks) we have one pool of RAID 10 for apps that need a bit more performance, but aren't quite important enough to make the higher tiers or for high speed file stores and one pool of RAID 6 for general purpose file stores.

One thing I've found is that unless you have an account manager at many of the business suppliers (Insight, Misco etc) the prices you see on the website are pretty bad. For instance I know that insight have almost always been cheaper than ebuyer/overclockers for us, and if their not they'll almost certainly price match.

Insight and WStore and our two regular suppliers, and between them to probably supply 60% of the equipment we purchase. Other main supplier is Dell direct through their education premier team. Yet to have their prices beaten by a Dell reseller or by HP/IBM/Lenovo. For most things we get quotes from at least 3 suppliers, and normally go to a few more adding in new suppliers to see how price competitive they are.

Ohhh I hadn't seen the HardOCP thread before. That 9U chenbro case is a monster

That wasn't a council but a commercial provider. Our council don't provide us with a SLA . The 100% uptime SLA was financially backed and was measured cross both the main fibre line and the backup ADSL line. They were also guaranteeing 99.9% uptime on the main fibre line

Having got quotes from a lot of suppliers over the last couple of months we've found CCSLeeds and Vaioni to be the two cheapest suppliers. Both were around £8.5k/year (3year contract) for 30mbit on a 100mbit bearer with ADSL backup and 99.9%/100% SLAs. All the major ISPs were much more than that. Do bear in mind however that both of the above are resellers which is why they can get cheaper pricing

Well just to update you all I've just got some pricing for the supermicro 36-bay chassis putting it at around £1200. Total cost for around 40tb of storage (including a good hardware RAID card, 16gb RAM, E5620 CPU etc) is coming in at about £5000-5500 depending on which parts we end up getting. That was based on using 20 of the 36-bays, leaving some room for expansion

As John says the Oracle box is a whole package. It makes use of the same backend software stack as Nexenta (ZFS, Solaris etc) and adds good hardware and a nice gui analytics package. The advantage is the way it makes use of RAM, SSDs and HDs to give the fastest performance possible. If you only wanted performance and weren't scared on the command line you could put together something similar using off-the-shelf hardware and Solaris/ZFS (or FreeBSD/ZFS). Alternatively you could possibly get something similar with Linux/BCache or Linux/Fastcache and one of the newer file systems (something like btrfs once its ready!)

If you stuck in the cost of Nexenta Systems you'd get some of the features. Still need some SSDs however but that would be a potent box

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone . Building a Backblaze pod does seem tempting. I've even found a UK group that have fabricated the cases and got all the hard to buy parts (UK Blazers and Custom Electronic Enclosures for Engineers and Designers) but I'm also being tempted by a 36-bay 4U supermicro case (Super Micro Computer, Inc. - Products | Chassis | 4U | SC847A-R1400UB). Hmmm decisions decisions

Looking at implementing a MS Lync based system here

I did think about a backblaze box (I use them for my home backups ), and it's certainly an option. Since all backups are to be replicated between two devices as you say it's not mission critical (unless the main file server dies), and the really important data is going to be held in the cloud somewhere. Now do I want to go and build my own backblaze box, or instead get one of the QNap or Overland devices. Choices choices!

I'm starting to look at our backup strategies now we have a (much) larger SAN and are starting to build up more and more data. Currently I'm liking the idea of using either Zmanda or Vembu Storegrid to carry out backups to disk, and then to replicate to a second backup server and/or specific data up into the "cloud" (Amazon S3 Europe most likely). We currently have a Thecus N8800 filled with 2tb drives that we're using as a backup target, but I'm looking at getting a second NAS server. The question is do we build it ourselves, get a supermicro/hp/dell server with openfiler/freenas or get a specific NAS server (qnap/thecus/netgear etc)? We'd be wanting to get as much space as possible, as cheaply as possible while still being fairly reliable. Anyone have any suggestions?

All of the Kindles I use also have the Amazon case with LED light (£50!), so light isn't a problem. If you can't read a normal book however you won't be able to read a Kindle (without something like the Amazon case). I'd say its a bargain at £150. The 3G access saved us so much money while on holiday recently, and I'd say the device its self is worth at least £150. I've also found I read alot more when I have a Kindle with me. Its so convenient to carry around that I tend to have it with me when the other half is shopping, or while waiting in the car for someone and if I get bored of the book I'm reading I can easily switch

Thank you all for the birthday wishes While I've now finally got my own Kindle 3G, both my parents and my girlfriend have had them for several months so I've already spent alot of time using them. 3G access is good, and is handy when you're abroad and want to quickly checkup on email or look something up. The kindle its self is nice and easy to use. Coming from a Sony PRS-600 the lack of glare is nice, but I'm missing the touch screen aspect a little . Any other questions just ask!

Well I was trying to keep it quiet . Thank you to rh91uk for the chocolates, now off to play with my new Kindle

I've had the exact same issue with the 7110 and XenServer. Very quick question - are you running any DNS servers outside of XenServer (i.e. physical servers not VMs)? The issue I've found is centred around how solaris responds to NFS requests. It expects DNS to be alive so it can do a reverse DNS lookup. With DNS present (and the XenServer and 7110 both being present in DNS) it's fine - as soon as its not there you can't get it to connect. iSCSI doesn't have this issue. There are a couple of solutions to the problem. The first is if you have physical DNS server (or a physical DC with DNS) to ensure that the XenServer IPs and 7110 IP are both entered correctly and that DNS and reverse DNS lookups are working correctly. If you don't have a physical DNS server, then you can do what I did and bodge one together . Either running a windows DC on local XenServer storage, or run a separate linux bind server for the storage network. I did run a separate linux bind server on the storage network (was just a VM on local storage in XenServer) until recently when we put a physical DC back in. If you need any help let me know. Took me months to figure out this problem previously!

Hi Butuz, I've only just seen your reply, so sorry for the very tardy response . I do indeed work in a roughly 1100 secondary school. But when EMC offers you the sorts of discounts we got its hard to say no - they were one of the cheapest options we had when we went out to tender as well as giving us the most kit. Winning combination really

I have to say that "experts" annoyed me greatly as well. I was told time and again that it would be impossible for us to get a working XenDesktop system setup and running on our own as it was simply too complicated that we needed the help of "experts". If anything it made us do things on our own, and as you've found Dave with a little time and effort anythings possible I'd love for you to come visit - and the same goes for anyone else that's interested in VDI or how we do things here. I've got your PM so I'll drop you a line Still have one or two bugs to iron out, but hopefully they should be gone as we move to the newly released XenDesktop 5 - which actually looks pretty easy to setup compared to XenDesktop 4!