Soulfish

PA isn't cheap that's for sure!! I have heard it described as the Rolls Royce of the firewall world and I wouldn't disagree. If you can make use of its layer-7 feature set then it's definitely one to look at. We compared Fortinet, Watchguard, Sonicwall, Juniper and Cisco to Palo Alto and while plenty were much cheaper none worked anywhere near as well. We have 1g on 1g, but the PA-3020s are a redundant pair. Both setup with the same config, but the licensing is setup so that only 1 can be physically firewalling/passing traffic at any time. We have the cold-spare (it's not automated as that costs £££ and requires it to be a hot-spare ) as we got a very good deal, and gives us peace of mind! If you're doing 100/100 why not look at something like the PA-2020 up to the PA-2050? They're all designed to cope with 100mb - 500mb lines. Only downside with the PA-2000 series is the interface can be a bit slow as the management processor was underspecced in that range unfortunately! But by going for a slightly smaller box you'll probably find you save a fair few k on the box price and licensing.

Be careful when looking at the magic quadrant stuff. Gartner/PA class the PA product set as a Next-Gen Firewall (NGFW), so it gets included in a different magic quadrant report (confusing! but read UTM vs NGFW - A Single Shade of Gray | Anitian Blog). We've got a PA-4020, which is shortly being replaced with 2 x PA-3020 (now they've finally been announced!). Love the feature set, App-ID/User-ID is amazing as is the whole blocking apps based on application profiles rather than ports etc. We did trial and look at several other appliances but nothing came close to the PA. We don't use the filtering (although we did demo it and it seemed OK, not amazing, but comparable to other firewall companies) as we still use and will continue to use Smoothwall for that. Very happy with our SWG-1200's for filtering

Quick question since MLS support isn't being great at answering this question. Does anyone have the Biostore settings for MLS/Biostore to connect to a pre-existing biostore instance elsewhere (our cashless system). Need the settings to let me finish setting up a new library PC. MLS seem to only be able to give me half the settings I need, so any help would be appreciated!

But only for use for the XenDesktop infrastructure If you want to use it for other stuff you still need to buy XenServer Enterprise

I noticed that a while ago when I realised our exam entries hadn't sent as I'd expected - good to know there's a patch for it now though!

Smoothwall here. 2 x SWG-1200 hardware units (it's there filtering only option), although I've also run it as both a VM and on my own hardware before without issue. Lovely and easy to use

I normally have a look at Refurbished Dell Computers and Dell Outlet - Refurbished Laptops, Desktops & Servers | Dell UK for the best deals. The Dell outlet normally has some cracking deals on laptops including 3yr NBD.

Using SFP+ twinax cables you won't get more than about 10m. Typically 5-7m can be done passively, for 7-10m the cables are typically active due to signal degradation.

Feel free to contact us - we've got a fully functioning Moodle 2.3 install linked to our SIMS/AD. Manage most of it in house but pay for ZiLink from SchoolsICT. Really well used within school and most staff are loving it

Moodle with full integration with SIMS and AD. Auto enrollments into the correct courses as timetables are changed in SIMS with the wonderful ZiLink. Full parental reporting as well. Really really liking Moodle 2.3 (drag and drop upload by default has made our staff super happy!)

From 1/9/2012 to 16/10/2012 we've run off 222,553 copies (50,820 colour, 171,733 mono). We're a secondary with around 450 students and 60ish staff. Staff can print what they want but everything is recharged to their department. Students get print quotas and within that can print whatever colour/mono pages they want (colour costs a lot more than mono). Works quite well

We have a combination of Ricoh MFDs (MPC3501's, MPC7501's and MP8001's) and Kyocera Printers (FS-C8500DN's, FS-C5350DN's, FS-4040DN's and FS-2020DN's). We mostly use the Ricoh MFDs with PaperCut MF and fingerprint biometric follow-me printing with the kyocera printers in specialist areas or offices. Love PaperCut though - absolutely brilliant piece of software

Got to agree about the PA firewalls. We got a PA-4020 in the summer for our new 1gb connection (we moved away from LGfL) and it's absolutely brilliant . SSL VPN could be a bit better, but the firewall side is absolutely amazing

I get the central line every day and unfortunately I've never seen them

Yeah site wide wireless here and been used since day 1. Currently have around 450 laptops using it, plus student phones/ipads, staff phones/tablets and guests. Without it we wouldn't be able to teach the sort of curriculum we have or run our 1-1 laptop scheme. Well worth the money

I use TSOHost, but Vidahost/TSO are all the same company at the end of the day - Paragon Internet Group Ltd. Good bunch of guys and had nothing but great support from them (<5 min replies to tickets at 3am in the morning is great ).

Have they got the redesigned home screen/calendar in for this release? Was sure it was this release they were including it in, but I may be wrong!!

I know that at the free school that opened at the same time as us all the IT was provided by a 3rd party IT company (ala BSF). Most free schools are up and running in a year or two, so I suspect we'll see most outsourcing their IT provision. The schools just don't have the manpower to do anything else to be perfectly honest - as a new build academy it was around 7-8 years from conception to our first intake of students. A free school has much much shorter timescales to work with once they get their funding agreement from the DfE.

Our server room is arranged in a hot isle/cold isle format, but we don't have the full containment between the two. It's just setup so that cold air from the chillers arrives at the front of the racks, with the hot air being dumped out the back where it's then extracted from the room . Room temp is kept at around 20-21 with around 50% humidity

For us it's mostly been Insight (combination of really good account manager that I get on well with, good pricing, being on the OGC/GPS framework, and a website that means I can order on credit for small stuff!), Stone (for laptops/netbooks), with NetCtrl for some specialised stuff. Also used WStore (now Misco) and Dell (although we've now blacklisted buying direct from Dell due to rude/unhelpful account managers - quotes should not be returned with pricing higher than the website lists!). We've also just started using Milgate for some quotes based on feedback from here so we'll see how we go. Luke seems like a nice guy though

At my last place we had GPP working great. Set it up on a brand new infrastructure here last year in exactly the same way and it's been buggy as hell all year and can take 15-20 seconds to apply just the GPP printer settings. In the end I went back to good old fashioned VBS login scripts which have worked flawlessly and are lightning quick. I did try and debug some of our issues, and certainly found others on technet experiencing similar things but unfortunately didn't have enough time to spend tweaking and playing so went for the quick fix. I still use GPP for other things, and it seems to work fine for them (shortcut or file deployment, drive mappings, registry changes etc) just printers that seem to give me grief!

Got a PA-4020 box here on a 1gig line. Performance is great, and loving the feature set . The guys at Palo Alto Networks/NetCtrl have been great in getting what we wanted when we wanted and helping us set it all up

Last summer I had 300 PCs to be unboxed. We paid the courier company to do it instead. Money well spent. Took 2 of them 3 days to unbox everything and then another 2 days to clear the room of rubbish. The room was filled with rubbish - you couldn't move for it

Another recommendation for M247. Our new leased line with EFM backup has just gone live. Got it sorted in extra quick time and everyone I've dealt with has been great We manage our own firewall however (Palo Alto PA-4020) with Smoothwall filtering (SWG-1200's - 3 of them atm ) for the best of both worlds.

We've got a few of those around (although we did pay a fair bit less than that for them) as we found several cheaper alternatives just kept dying on us. After the 5th return we gave up, got a refund and stumped up for the more expensive units!