theaksy

Hi all Wondered what colour laser printers people were using, and how they faired for toner costs? We have a managed service in, but looking to get rid. Need a colour laser in the mean time. Unmanaged we have a Kyocera FS-C5200DN that costs around £400 for a pack of toner! and a couple of HP 2600n that cost around £160 for the pack but don't network particularly well! I haven't compared yields yet, though it is clear we get more from the Kyocera (which is just as well!) Suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks!

I'd thought about the 3d route, I saw a supplier on the BETT website but couldn't see how developed their solution was or the availability of resources. Don't suppose you know of anyone with 3d running in a classroom?

Hi! Hoping for some edugeek inspiration. Been asked to look into creating an innovative learning environment crammed with IT equipment that teachers can use to enhance teaching an learning. Unfortunately I was ill when BETT was on so didn't get to go see what's new and amazing, but have scoured their site for ideas. Obviously got the standard interactive whiteboard (prob the dual touch smartboard) with projector and speakers, and we'll prob have a trolley or cabinet of laptops/netbooks. Wondered what everyone else had seen/currently have that is proving amazing in the classroom?

Which SAN would you reccommend? I'm wanting to go down the iSCSI route (haven't looked at the pricing of 10G yet but would be nice!) as it seems the most flexible. The Sun 7120 has caught my eye (and gets quite al ot of love on here) and will look at the NetApps too - looks like much of it is in the licensing of the features.

I was thinking about the performance aspect of sharing user docs from the same san as what's holding my VMs. There is surely going to be a hit on the speed of my VMs because users are also accessing files from it? The bottleneck I'm thinking would be the nic, or would you make 2 private for VM access and 2 public for user docs access? The alternative I'm thinking of is a separate NAS with a NAS head to serve out user docs (assuming a NAS head makes quota and security simpler) Cheers

Hi Quick question for everyone, am interested in how other people are working with their sans Do you split your san holding your VMs from your san holding your student/staff documents? I'm thinking of the performance aspect of running a bunch of VMs on a dedicated san, to sharing that san with documents etc. At present I'm probably going down the route of a san for my VMs to sit on, and then a NAS to map documents to. Any thoughts? Thanks!

We recently had CSE in to install 7 smartboards and projectors, and couldn't fault them. They were very helpful in the design stage, our account manager definitely knows her stuff and gave some really helpful advice. We also had a visit from an engineer prior to ordering to make sure the installation would go smoothly. The project was out to 5 companies to quote on, and I must admit with the attention to detail I got from CSE I was expecting a bloated quote, but they beat everyone hands down. We're in Scarborough, so they are based very local to us. It's nice to be able to send work locally rather than to some guy on the end of the phone the other end of the country who hasn't even visited the site! Installation was scheduled for 3 days but actually only took 2 and a bit which was handy as we had alot of work to get done after too! Their engineers did a very neat, professional installation - definitely go for the Nuvo speakers, they save so much wiring (and are great for plugging your ipod in when you're working in the room!!) Anyway, give them a call, its 01723 366512 If you're not too far from Scarborough you'd be more than welcome to pop in and see our rooms!

Major thanks for all of the replies everyone, really, really appreciate it. Seems like there is alot of love for the sun hardware. The 7410 would be an amazing amount of storage to play with, but I think it's not quite within the budget at the moment (well, not if I want to buy any servers anyway!). Am definitely looking at the 7110 though, and will have a look at other vendors to see how they compare. What is the expandability of the 7110 like? Can you link up a JBOD to increase it's capacity? Or if you go for the smaller capacity can you easily swap for the larger drives as and when? I've usually bought HP or IBM servers, what are people's thoughts on the Sun servers in terms of performance, features and reliability? I was really for the blades, but I'm now thinking about fliexibility and expansion - sales people have quotes the £700 back in running costs per year with the blades, but that's really only if you switch everything else off, which isn't going to happen straight away!

Hi Some time ago I posted about a server upgrade I was proposing, and the various options i was considering... well, finally I've been given the ok! I've been looking at blades, using the IBM bladecentre S with built in hard drive enclosure, and with my budget (17K) can afford 2 blades (I have to include UPS at £3800 and NAS at £1100 int he 17K too which is helpful!). I'm planning on virtualizing the entire network over time, starting with the DCs and document servers, and then eventually SIMS (prob when sql 2008 is supported) and all of our other servers as they become too old. I've come round to thinking however that although blades are neat, reduced power etc etc, I would be limiting myself in terms of storage and vendor lock-in, and as I can only afford 2 blades at the moment I may consider my options. I'm now wondering whether I can afford maybe 3 powerful rackmounts and a dedicated SAN that I can then expand in the future. I see many people on here are fans of the Sun 7100 SAN. I was originally looking as using iSCSI, but I am interested as to whether i can afford fibre. The suppliers I am speaking to were great for the blades, but I'm not sure they have too much experience with SANs. Anyone got any good suggestions for a SAN and the supporting hardware I would need to purchase? Rackmount-wise I'll probably look at the usual HP and IBMs and whack in a couple of disks and 24Gb ram. I was also thinking, as I'm not too familiar with the fibre channel business, I have out old backbone switch that has about 8 fibre ports, would this be any use for connecting the fibre? Thoughts are much appreciated as I want to get a solution specced and purchased before the end of the hols so I can begin migration as soon as possible (yes, would have been nice to have been able to do this over the summer wouldnt it!) Many thanks!

Thanks for the replies. @FN-GM - I'm wanting to maximise the bandwidth available to clients to access their docs. 1 server would be fine space wise, but a couple of suites of users accessing large photoshop files and I would say you're goning to get poor performance. With each intake year having it's own server for docs the performance is going to be very much improved? @UKDarkstar - I had considered NAS, say one per intake for bandwidth, but havent seen a solution that integrates nicely with AD and NTFS permissions. I'm going to expand our NAS for backup though. @tmcd35 - Don't suppose you have an idea of price for the SAN (and presumably fibre channels)? I don't have any experience in this setup so performance intrigues me hugely. I guess the bandwidth accessing files is going to be pretty much the same as though the storage was on the server as it will be limited to 1Gb per nic anyway?

Hi all, Am developing a proposal to update our core server infrastructure as they are over 6 years old now. I have about 1000 student users and 100 staff, and host an exchange server which at present only has staff mailboxes, but will very soon have student mailboxes too. The exchange server is very much up to the task however. I would like to give every student 1Gb storage, and want to optimise the bandwidth available for file serving. I am thinking of two options at the moment: Option 1 is made up from separate rackmount servers. 2 domain controllers and 5 file servers, one for each intake year, dishing out their my docs. Each server would have 250Gb RAID 5 and 2 nics. Option 2 is to whack in a bladecenter S with all 6 blades. Virtualise one powerful blade into two domain controllers and then the other 5 less powerful blades act as profile servers. Allow the 5 profile servers to make use of the shared storage for docs and have their own internal drives for the OS. I prefer option 2 as it is more expandable, takes less cab space, uses less power etc. But have two concerns. 1 - am I wasting the power and flexibility of the blades by using them as file servers and missing the ethos of the blade; and 2 - what it the performance like when the 5 blades are using the same discs? Would be interested to hear what other people use as their core server infrastructure, and any views on the two options above. The third option I suppose is to get a totally separate SAN and maybe 3 very high powered rackmount servers and then virtualise the whole shebang, but I think that may be a bit too expensive. Cheers!

I had the Conficker virus. No need to shut down your network. Set your anti virus (I use sophos) to on write access scanning, restart computer then do full scan. This should now pick up the virus and allow you to remove it. Push out the patch via GP if you don't have WSUS. If you use ISA, search for any host accessing the sites Conficker tries to access. This will give you a list of infected machines. Clean these up using the method above and then clear the virus alerts. Wait to see if you get any more alerts (may take a few hours). If you do, check ISA logs again. You may get machines warning you they have been infected then the file has been deleted. Conficker can spread using the ADMIN$ share, so this warning is basically telling you a machine on your domain has tried to infect it, not that it has the virus. Hope this helps. Took me 3 days to clear, but not that much work. It certainly helps you find the workstations that aren't running anti-virus properly. As a side note, if you have sophos, upgrade to the enterprise console 3.1. Its much better at automatically installing sophos according to linked active directory OUs. If you need any advice give us a shout