Soulfish

For cables one thing I've done + seen done elsewhere is to have a colour banding system (similar to resistors for anyone familiar with them ). So you'd have for instance 4 bands, with each band being one of a selection of colours. With 2 colours and 4 bands you get 16 different combinations. Expand it to 4 colours and you get 256 combinations. If you need more you just add extra bands and/or colours Obviously it means you have to keep a listing of combinations somewhere, unless you happen to have an amazing memory.

Given the pricing I've been getting on the external connectors I think the break even point for us is a long way off Actually I'd missed this previously so thanks for pointing it out again . MS licensing (actually most licensing) is just one giant headache

I think if your a big enough customer then you can get everything tied back to your own special ID using something called "Select Plus" (Microsoft Select Plus Overview). But to do that you need to buy a lot of software every year or have a schools agreement!

Opps just realised that post was meant to read External connector per server rather than per student . Would get very very expensive pretty quickly if it was per student! The way Ramesys/Pugh both suggested to license was to get an Exchange CAL for every PC we have and then a student connector for every student. At around £1.20ish for a student connector license it wasn't as expensive as I first imagined.

I was told that if the students are accessing Exchange (either internally or externally) then we either need student connector licenses for each student, or an external connector license for each server (not student as it originally read!). And MS really do need to rethink their licensing for Office in a TS (or similar) environment. It's just a pain in the backside

My girlfriend went for a pretty decent phone deal on Three last year. One of the worst decisions we could have made - we've had no end of trouble! Lots of dropped calls, calls just not getting through, poor reception and very poor call quality (so bad that when she's near a landline she'll hangup and use that). I'd avoid Three at all costs!

Which company is it that you use out of interest?

Just putting in a HP ProCurve 5412zl as our core switch here. Would of liked the 8212zl but unfortunately my budget doesn't quite stretch that far!

I have to say that when I was looking at what was offered by blades vs rack mount servers I couldn't really make the business case for them at the moment. You do get the advantage of being able to aggregate things (with the various switch modules that plug into the chassis fabric) to reduce cabling with blade servers, but without having two or more chassis it did seem very much like you still had a single point of failure.

I've no idea what actually gets sent to Sun - Andy at Cutter did it all for us. He sent us the quote based on us getting Matching Grant approval, and we sent the PO to purchase it. Once we were sure we were ordering he went away and got the matching grant approval for us (takes a few days for Sun to approve it) while our finance people got the PO faxed over

Well Sun have approved our matching grant request through Cutter, and I've been talking with one of the Managers at Sun (sorting out some problems we were having with people quoting us when they weren't sun educational partners like cutter and so couldn't get the pricing they'd originally promised) at he didn't seem to have a problem with us going for matching grant. From talking to Andy at The Cutter Project it also seems that they've done this for a few schools now

If you were replacing old and dodgy Cat 5 caballing would you all replace it with 5e or 6? We're looking to roll out gig to the desktop over the next few years and obviously both support this. John

Yep - opted for Citrix XenServer Enterprise. Just couldn't justify the VMware costs!

I'm the same. Needed to spec some new servers, so looked at getting some D380 G5's and a HP SAN, and then I heard about the Sun offer. Gave The Cutter Project a call and Andy spent a good while going through and requoting me on a huge array of different options. I've just gone ahead and ordered (the PO got faxed this morning ) 4 x Sun Fire X4150's (4x 146gb 10k SAS drives, 32gb ram, 2 x intel xeon quad core E5450, 4x gigabit nic, onboard lights out with dedicated network port) and a Sun 7110 2tb storage system for a great price. Actually you can see the price list at Sun Microsystems - UK - Promotions - FY09 2H Matching Grant Programme. After looking at the Sun kit it's got some great features. Unlike other manufacturers it has a fully featured onboard lights out - no having to buy licenses for extra feature packs (ala HP!). The SAN is also fully featured. Want to do replication or snapshotting? No problem, and no need to purchase extra licenses for even more cash - it's already included. They've also managed to fit into 1U what others were taking 2U to do, and I still get more memory sockets and network ports then the HP or Dell equivalents in that 1U space. I did see if Dell could match/beat the pricing on the Suns but they were still around 20% more per server!

It's nice to see HP catching up with what Sun offer on their servers (number of memory slots, number of network ports as standard). Now if they could only fit the 2U server into 1U like Sun and offer something similar to matching grant then I'd be able to consider them again Can't wait to see what Suns new range of Xeon servers is like when they release them next week

Just looking to move to 2008 DC for the same reasons. As has been mentioned do remember that it's licensed by CPU socket (so a dual quad-core server needs 2 x Datacentre licenses). Out of interest who are you getting your pricing from as it seems about 10% cheaper then the quotes we've been getting!

I managed to splash my shirt with pasta sauce at lunch - I've been hiding in the office ever since!

That's one decent setup! Any hints as to how much it all set you back? Particularly the SAN! Currently looking at getting ourselves 4 similar spec Sun servers (Dell can't seem to get near the Sun matching grant pricing) and a Sun SAN and then use Citrix XenServer for virtualisation. VMware was just a little too expensive for my tastes

That's how it used to work here, but something I'm very keen to change. I'd much prefer to know how much I have to work with in any given year then have to rely on SMT to approve/deny my requests each time!

The licenses that are sold for Windows Vista under both the select and school agreements is only a upgrade license. You're required to have a "qualifying operating system" on the PC first. A qualifying operating system is basically any version of Windows since Windows 98 (including Vista Home Basic & Visa Starter Edition). The vista licenses also give you downgrade rights, so once again you can use any previous version of Windows including XP Pro provided you meet the "qualifying OS" criteria

What tools/resources are you all using to do you financial management and planning? Do you just have spreadsheets like budgester or other things as well? If anyone is willing to share their plans/tools then that would also be greatly appreciated

Sounds like the same problems I'm having! Seems that around 60% of the machines are beyond even a 5-year lifecycle, and finding out what licenses we have is proving difficult. Ramesys were able to give me a list of what we've bought from them, but it seems that some of the earliest XP/2k3 CALs were purchased elsewhere I have a fairly good idea of what hardware we have now thanks to the wonderful OCS-NG inventory software. Just need to get it hooked into GLPI and I can move us away from our very basic help desk system!

I've just started here and I'm starting to put together a 3/4/5yr development plan and budget for the department. Previously there wasn't any financial management of IT spend/IT support so I'm having to work from and plan from some very sketchy figures!

Hi everyone, We may be doing a test deployment of thin clients for 10-30 machines in the next few weeks. From talking to a few suppliers it's obvious that there are a large variety of different options for both the physical devices and the software to run it all. Does anyone have any recommendations for good makes/models for the hardware? Also what are you all using to run your thin client networks? Terminal Services, VMWare, Citrix? And how are you finding it? Recommendations for solutions would be great Finally what software have you found can/can't be used on the thin clients? John

Hopefully it'll be two . Do you know if Sun have released the functionality to use the JBOD units for expansion yet? May be looking to get them now given the price they're available for with the Matching Grant Program!