AndyB4rks

Just got off the phone to Matt at Stone he is doing me a price for me too. Looks like the i5 is the way to go.

Just contacted Chris who is doing me some pricing on a few bits and pieces. @chazzy2501 Depends on game!

I have potentially £50k to spend on as many computers as I can get, the question im asking is what sort of spec is decent enough these days? And what should be the minimum or maximum I should go for along with top and bottom priceprice? Our old computers are mostly core2duos, having not bought any computers for the last 3/4 years im well out of date on desktop chips and speed My very basic basics are: 22" Monitor 4gb Ram

is it this one? 250w 1U PC Power Supply FSP250-50LC / FSP250-50PLB

I think I will look at both options and make a decision from there. I just dont want to rush in to anything and end up with some duff kit.

Just been checking on the fibre cards and they will fit the servers no problem the question is can I get a nas with a fibre connection to the brocade 210. Its either that or a new set of switches and cards. Im open to suggestions as there are so many ways to go about this.

I have to produce a quick report to let SMT know what costs were looking at with a few different options so I may PM him later.

All I can say is your place must have a nice pile of cash. We moved into a new build in 2008 and had all new kit and were promised that we would have a decent budget year on year. As you can see that didnt happen and now were stuck with old unreliable kit. Im still agonizing over what to do as we have the san and the 6 servers all on fibre to the brocade but if I swap to copper I would have to buy a new switch and cards to do it. Only alternative is to use the existing cards and fibre and find some decent storage. Its all a little sad really that were reduced to this.

Wow that's some setup you have there how long did it take to setup?

What sort of price are we talking, did you spec any other options like 10gb card?

Don't blame you, I wouldn't fancy doing that either. What sort of speed are you getting with your nas at the moment? Im quite lucky in some respects as we currently have vmware on the old stuff and for the new stuff im setting up mostly new vm's on Hyper-V so I can run side by side for a while. Am liking the look of this after reading the review of that new qnap here

Has anyone seen/used one of these? QNAP TS-879U-RP 10GbE NAS Server

We have 2 of these but im open to suggestions. Been looking at 2012 for a while, looking forward to testing it a bit. I thought of that but we cant rely on the SAN as its flakey.

You totally echo my thoughts there, problem is we need to do something as the san is on its last legs and they are adamant that we cant have anymore despite my protests...

I'm after some advice, basically we budgeted for a new SAN and some servers to replace our old ones, long story short they cut our budget from 50k to 10k. Out of this I need either a SAN or a NAS with at least 10 to 15tb of space and any other ancillaries. Our network currently consists of an old NEC SAN that is end of life and it has around 8tb of space and is connected to a brocade switch. The SAN is used with vmware and hosts around 28 vms and a few luns for staff/student work. The plan is to reuse the 6 servers that run the vm's and move over to Hyper-V, this is the easy bit believe it or not. We have around 2000+ students and around 550 staff. So the question is what can I get for 10k or under that would best suit my needs?

Any update on this did it arrive and is it ok?

Going to take a look at all of these as need to get something in place, how easy is robocopy and rsync to use? Just looked at backup pc looks really good am going to try this too.

Ah cool never hear of some of them, does anyone know if they do differential copy?

Hope I put this in the right sub forum? Anyway does anyone know of some good open source backup software that will backup windows 2008r2, exchange 2010, sql08 and possible some vmware vm's. Preferably it needs to do to differential or some method of deduplication and it will be backing up to a nas. Background info: We currently use windows backup using a script however we have found it to be a little slow and it eats up lots of space. Our nas has around 8tb of space and a 1gb connection Unfortunately our budget has been cut this year and we have no money for software or hardware (going to be a very tough year) hence the need for no cost software. Cheers

+1 awesome app and so easy to use.

Here is an msi that I made last week its v6.3 release 0 build 4 here It runs the install without any interaction and installs to program files/hot potatoes/ and creates shortcuts in the start menu. Hope it helps

We had this exact problem and it turned out to be the power supply causing the fault, you can ask stone for a price for the power supply however it depends if the case in question is end of life or not as some of the sff cases you can no longer get power supplies for. Also we had some that turned out to be motherboard faults and in the end we just had to scrap these, also we had some faulty power switches that would stick causing it to turn the computer off. Hope some of this helps.

Try this software its a gui for adding and deleting routes New GUI alternative to the route utility of Windows

Try XBMC Live it runs from usb or cd by far the best media player, they do other versions too mac, windows,xbox. XBMC

Here is a link to the release notes http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html