glennda

That is fair enough - we are just getting one specced up now for a client so depending on when you are looking to purchase I will give you some feedback on them. Plus I passed the exam so if you have any problems with setup let me know and I'll try and help!

I've not used I-desks before but others - personally I just get a good chippie and some quality kitchen worktop and get something built.

Not sure if its already reported but was flicking through and didn't see anything Basicly if you see post #9 which i posted from PC has Sig - post #11 doesn't which came from my phone http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/102871-open-e-data-storage-software-anybody-use.html

See what @Millgate can do

Take a look the broadberry kit - from speaking with the guys that arrange here they seem very on the ball with open-e. I'm actually looking to get a smalldevice (with enough slots Gordon expansion) for one of my smaller expanding clients. For example you could get a 24 or 36 bay chassis fill half now and expand into it with extra license and disks in the future.

What hardware you looking at?

Open-E uses XFS. In terms of the file system for clustering it users DRDB so it replicates data between two physical nodes. Setup your nodes with either a direct connection between them for Heartbeat and volume replication. Its explained a bit more in this PDF http://documents.open-e.com/Failover_supported_by_Open-E_software.pdf

I setup the following at my last place. We did - ubuntu with apache and VSFTPD - and then set the website to /home/webuser/ students logged in and then created there own folder so that when they accessed they went to http://studentcoursework/therename and got access to the site they created.

Yes we have been discussing this! It is recommended to run from SATA DOM's drive rather then USB drives. I've just setup an iscsi active active cluster using 2 nodes including replication in 10 mins just gotta pass my exam in an hour! It does seem very powerful and the guys here from Broadberry who custom make servers to run the OS which comparable with SANs are stupidly cheap!

*BUMP* for those that missed yesterday!

What connection out the other side are you going to have? Single 1GBE? If so then your going to hit the network limit for before the disks massively.

Just a quick scout really to see if anybody here uses the software provided by Open-E in the education sector? or anybody on here not in education but using it? I'm currently doing there Training for the Activ-Activ Configuration to become an Open-E Certified Engineer which provides fault tolerance and full host redundancy at a huge fraction of the cost that is normally associted with these kind of configurations. Including support for 10GBE/FC along with the ability to act as an NAS device.

IMHO you won't get decent performance from Sata disks! The raid controller on it doesn't look great either. When it comes to front end storage there is no point skimping at all.

+ 1 for Lenovo - they are starting to look nicer and are rather robust. I have an Lenovo E420s do agree about the touchpad a little but nothing worse then a macbooks stupid touchpad!

it doesn't say that but i'm going on experience of working with that kind of client. I have 1 client with 3 users who have nearly 3TB's of data as they keep everything live.

You would get very good perfomance out of this running Open-E. V7 is a simple upgrade SR2612UR-24 I'm currently at the training for Open E Certified Engineer training so if you like the look of it and have any questions post them! Plus 10TB for a photographic/CAD business isn't a huge amount IMHO! especially with Raid and Replication space.

It depends on what you want to be able to achvieve is it purely for clustering? Large Sans at 10TB are expensive although solutions like Open-E for custom built Sans are very good and bring that cost down a lot.

2010 Version of backup exec is fine - its just the updated gui in the new version which is horrible! With Veeam if you go onto there website you can locate a reseller.

O2 Service Status

Thats more likely the components chosen rather then stone themselves being at fault. I always specified everything including mobo etc so that its not going to end up with a gigbyte one for example!

My Samsung 830 256 arrived about 10 mins ago - I've gotta work out how to clone the drive from my laptop which is 320 to the smaller drive - ideas people?

its called business...

In terms of Cost HP/Dell never compete like for like IMHO plus the support can be a nightmare - with Stone I just called through said x was broken engineer turned up and fixed it the next day normally. Meanwhile I swapped out the machine with a temporary one.

Personally I would go with Request Tracker and then setup users to email a mailbox which request tracker pulls from.

They will also do 5 year on-site warranty's. At my previous place I payed less then 300 quid a pop for Core I3, 4Gb ram and Corsair SSD's. The New cases from stone are very good and the chance of breaking is quite hard. The school i recently left bought a load of NovaTech machines which appear to be very plasticy cases from what they have said. I used to have over 750 stone desktops and can't fault them in a single way!