Soulfish

Can I ask how big your school is? And is it a secondary 11-16 or college etc?

So did you get the £150k/year or less then that?

I'm hoping that once I've put together my proposed budget and I'm been given whatever SMT see fit, that I'll at least be left in charge of that! Out of interest dwhyte85 what's the size of your school? Anyone else willing to share your budget figures?

Since starting here around 8 weeks ago I've been working through the various paperwork we have (whenever I get a spare minute!) putting together a 5-year budget proposal. Since this hasn't been done previously and paperwork is a little thin on the ground at times there has been a lot of guess work involved. Before I go ahead and submit my proposals, and after talking with my line manager, I was wondering what you were all being allocated for IT spend? If you wouldn't mind could you give me some details on what your yearly budget is, size of the school and type of school? My line manager also wanted to know if anyone was getting any dedicated grants or funds from anywhere (such as extra funding for specialist status etc)? He's always after hidden pots of cash that they haven't thought of Thanks everyone! John

Some of our newer laptops are currently running Vista (although we're moving them back to XP as they come in for audit), everything else is currently running XP however.

We got ours for around £200ish, expiring in April 2011. If you have a schools agreement and 5 server licenses under it I've been told that you also get a Technet subscription as a Software Assurance benefit

In theory you could expand the storage array using the JBODs drives, allowing to increase storage capacity when you need to without having to either purchase a huge amount to begin with or purchase a whole new unit

Toshiba have been blacklisted by SMT here. Too many faults that they weren't willing to repair, or when they did repair kept coming back! They didn't seem to be interested in our complaints/problems so we'll be taking our business elsewhere. Currently looking at moving to Dell/HP as the most cost effective option.

Looks like the holiday to Mexico that I booked two months ago for October isn't going to happen then

Simons also the only supplier I've given my mobile number to Always helpful and willing to go that extra mile for us!

We've actually gone ahead and bought a 7110 (along with some X4150's!) to use as our SAN. Haven't had a chance to fully set it up yet (no air conditioning means I'm not risking frying our lovely new equipment until we get it ) but what little I have seen is amazing Actually I have to complement the phone home function - the UPS that one of the PSUs was connected to died while it was on, got an email from Sun to say an automatic support call had been logged and then an email from Sun support asking me to try and couple of things to see if we could find the problem. Nice to know that the support is there if we need it One quick question I do have for you Phil, and I don't know if you'll be able to answer it, is the JBOD addons that have been talked about for the 7110. I have heard that they may not be available for this version of the 7110 - do you know what the current plans are, or are able to shed any light? Thanks, John

While I'd love to stick A/C in now it's something SMT want to hold off on until we know more about the temps in the room with the servers in there. The current location doesn't have A/C either and is currently sitting at around 30C (without any of the new servers being switched on!), which is one of the major considerations in moving the servers. Having never been near our boiler when it's on I've been assured that the room stays cold throughout winter and summer, and I've also been assured that the water pipes are on the opposite side of the (very) large boiler room. The floor is being raised due to a large concrete plinth that is too difficult to remove, so the servers will be at a much higher height than the boiler room so hopefully if the water pipes do burst we'll have some time to respond before the room floods totally! Which UPS manufacturers (other than APC) are people using? Or is it just worth sticking to the APC range of UPS equipment?

Hi Everyone, Since I started here a couple of months ago I've been looking to move the server rack into a dedicated server room (out of the first aid room/disabled lift room!). After talking to my line manager and the caretaker we finally think we have a workable solution (partitioning part of the boiler room to give us a dedicated server room!), and now we're talking to SMT to get approval to go ahead. As part of this move we're looking to also sort out our currently very poor UPS setup and put in some new racks. I was wondering what rack manufacturers people recommend? Which ones do you find easy to work with and give you all the nice cable routing features you want Also what UPS setups do people have. We'd be starting from scratch, and it looks like there won't be enough cash to put in a single (well 2 to give redundancy ) UPS for the room so I'm looking at what other schools are currently doing. I'm also looking for suggestions on environmental monitoring. We're not putting in A/C to begin with since the boiler room is around 15C all year round, but I was told if temperature/humidity is a problem then we'll get it installed. So a decent system to monitor this and other things like water/smoke detection would be great Finally anyone got any suggestions or hints/tips for putting in a new server room? We're currently hoping to get the room ready by the summer to allow us to move everything over once the school breaks up, and at the same time allow us to lay new fibre to all the comms cabinets. If anyone has any suggestions for companies that do cable installs in the south east (sussex) then that would also be greatly appreciated John

With around 400 machines and 1200 users (students and staff) we've got 1.5 technicians (myself and someone part time!) although that's moving to two of us full time in the summer. From that you've got 200:1 ratio

We're going to be starting from scratch. Moving to Windows Server 2008 in the summer so we're also going to take the opportunity to start everything with a clean slate!

Just setting up our new 7110 today and I have to agree with everyone else just how easy it is to use and configure! Now I just need to set up the Sun Fire X4150's we've got and install Citrix XenServer on them

Prices for Xen Server Enterprise (now Essentials for Xen Server, Enterprise Edition) that I was getting were in the £1150ish range per server. This was last month before they launched Essentials and I believe the pricing may have changed now but it gives you an idea

Have a look at Sun Microsystems - UK - Promotions - FY09 2H Matching Grant Programme. It's the price list for the Sun Matching Grant Programme to give you an idea on what you can get for your money . Do give the Cutter Project a call though. Andy there was great at getting me pricing for all the various configurations of equipment we were interested in John

I've just started using Tsohost.co.uk for my hosting needs. Really cheap, with great support and a freephone UK number during (extended!) office hours. They have a very interesting cluster based solution for not too much a year which I'm using. Gives you the best of both windows + linux hosting over an entire cluster of servers

I've just got 4 x Sun Fire X4150's and a Sun 7110 and 4 copies of Citrix XenServer Enterprise to install on them . Will probably be my project for tomorrow. We're hoping to have virtualised all of our existing servers by the Summer (we currently have a SIMS server and two other dells that run everything else including exchange!). I'll keep you updated on our progress tomorrow John

Hmmm I've just done some calculations for our server room and we're going to need around a 12kw unit once our new servers/SAN get switched on. Just need to convince SMT that we do need a dedicated server room and that the sick bay is going to get a little warm this summer!

Have to say it looks very nice and clean

Have a look at the Sun Matching Grant programme if you're after some new servers. Dell + HP couldn't get close to their pricing for what we were after, and you may find you can get two servers for similar to what your paying for just one. The price list is at http://uk.sun.com/specials/grantprog/pdf/MATCHING_GRANT_FY09H2_UK_ENDUSER_03APR09.pdf and have a word with the cutter project if you do decide to see what you can get with Sun. Just been told our new servers are being delivered tomorrow

Now that site looks like a lifesaver for me. I'm forever taking notes and unless I've taken them down in my main note book the bits of paper + other things always end up lost

Google was always a godsend when looking up resistor codes