Butuz

If you spend £10k+ on a CC3 network, you get it for free! Butuz

Just a heads up - I was hoping to buy these servers in order to use as exceptionally good value quad core powerful workstations, but unfortunatly HP are one step ahead - no sound card, no drivers for Win XP or Vista Plan officially scuppered. Butuz

To be honest - your server room should be just that - a room for the servers. No one should be working in there unless they want to go deaf. I've been fitting new equipment recently and it's been brought home to be recently as to the noise in there - going to have to get some good ear protectors in to satisfy H&S. Can you not partition your server room/office into two? Butuz

Yep a valid point indeed. In order of things most likeley to fail: 1) Disk Drives - moving at 10k rpm on some ball bearings these are most likeley to fail. So hot swap is a must, and use enterprise level SAS drives rather than budget SATA drives if you want the highest disk reliability. 2) FANs - again spinning at a few thousand RPM on ball bearings, these can fail, make sure they are hot swappable and more importantly, make sure the case design is clever enough for you to be able to hotswap them in situ, in the rack cabinet. 3) O/S. Can become corrupt. If your SANs OS goes down then so does your SAN. 4) Electronics - the storage controller and network card come under here - both items which could take your entire SAN down - BUT microprocessor devices with no moving parts are ultra reliable and I wouldnt expect a controller or NIC to fail within a 5 year lifespan, it is extremely rare. Can be offset by multiple NICs and multiple controllers if your totally paranoid. I would come at it from this angle: 1. Ideally for maximum disaster proofing / recovery you want to have 2 mirrored SANs spread apart in different buildings. This is the ideal scenario as if one san dies you have the other one which you can connect to. 2. A SAN is a dedicated storage device, with battery back up cache and possibly solid state cache drives. As such it should theoretically be far more reliable than just a normal windows box shoved full of disks. You should run in Raid 6 with a hot swap drive so that your SAN can sustain two concurrent drive faliures, and you should make sure the SAN has good same business day warranty on it, and that it is set up to alert you the minute it notices something going wrong. 3. If your consolidating from local storage on many older servers to shared storage on a new SAN then really you are giving yourself a big upgrade in relaibility - I'd trust a Sun 7110 over all of the old servers with old SATA / SCSI hard drives we had. Butuz

Agree with that. Infact it may not be up to individual schools, in some LEAs ordering from sole traders is exremely frowned upon - my school will not do it simply because of this, not worth the LEA hastle. I would reccomend becoming VAT registered and offering 30 day terms / purchase ordering if you want to get into the education market. (I expect plenty will disagree with me). All I will say is, starting your own business should not be taken lightly. If you are expecting just to fix some PC's here and there and make a living out of it I would suggest you be careful. If your going to jump straight in full time into it you want to make sure that you have a very solid business plan, and if you end up taking a good salary in your first couple of years then you are doing extremely well. Good luck! Butuz

Long shot. I am having terrible trouble with these monitors not working at their optimum resoloution on older PC's. On new PC's (EG Core 2 Duo / Quad) they work fine but on anything older they do not display correctly when set to the native res of 1680x1050. It does not really make sense to me! Butuz

I think you definatly need to upscale your server specs if your going to be running virtualised xenapp as well as two DCs. Franky - you would be better off running two high spec servers rather than four low spec servers - it wil save you electricity costs, and also in the future save you on waranty costs etc. Go for at least two servers each with Dual CPU Quad Core 3.16GHZ would do you good here. That will give you 16 x 3.16GHZ Cores rather than the 16 x 2.5Ghz Cores you have specified above. Also one thing to note is the latest Xeon 55xx series are considerably faster than the 54xx series. Butuz

Yes get one of those ICT direct PC's they're a bargain. Butuz

Clearly he needs to play Crysis in order to do his job. Butuz

HP Procurve are the leaders at the moment. I have never had to test the lifetime warranty as I've not had one fail in 5 years. Butuz

All very well shipping 650 boxes per month - not going to be much use is MS say it's illegal and you have to un-ship them! Butuz

Hmm its like Ibiza here! Sitting in my chair slowly melting! Butuz

Shame the school is undergoing the BSF process. How long until the successful candidate is made redundant / tuped? Butuz

For once mine went well, it takes about 5 - 10 seconds for the raid config to do it's stuff. I've reconfigured the raid from scratch several times during benchmarking between raid 0 raid 5 raid 6 and it's never hung. Butuz

Are these still in stock? Cheers Butuz

Half / Full duplex mismatch. Or could be the network interface of whatever is connected is malfunctioning. (e.g PC network card). What is connected to that particular port - do you know? Butuz

Yes agree with bossman on the future proofing. Whatever size you think you need now, in a year you'll need more and in three years you'll be buying a new backup drive again Butuz

Following this thread closely! I was planning on mirroring my 7110 onto a second 7110, and then backing up all of the data off the second 7110 to D2D2T. Still investigating exactly how to go about it! Butuz

Hey I did not mean to offend Bossman, yes my post was a bit flippant but I was in a mass rush. Appologies for that. I am just saying things as I see them. Yes TV's still need the TV repair man.... or do they? (either tv's need one repair every 5 years, or the TV is simply scrapped?) Yes, servers are not going to install themselves. But I think in the future, each school won't need masses of servers (if any), each school won't need massses of unreliable fat clients, each school will not need multiple technical support staff full time. Systems will just work most of the time (a'la TV), if a server fails in a datacentre, Vmotion brings it back up on another server within a couple of seconds, if a thin client fails (has anyone actually had a thin client fail???) within minutes another can be put in its place, the desktop will be presented back to the user intact as they left it. Of course, the datacentre is a weak link, the connection between the school and the datacentre is a weaker link.. But let's not forget that 10-15 years ago, barely any schools had a leased line, and I was a seriously quick internet user at home on my 64k ISDN, now, most schools have a leased line, even primaries, and I get annoyed if i cant get a 10Meg connection at home. In 15 years time, schools will have at worst, single very fast reliable connections, at best, multiple redundant connections. I just think in this thread that some people are fighting the technology far too much. you'll lose that fight, for sure. And yes I am quite young (ish) Butuz

Bossman your living in a dream world if you think you're job is going to be super secure forever. You can't fight the tide - the tide is going to be for computer systems to need less and less technical support, ideally computer systems should run like a TV. Turn on, do what you want, turn off. End of. No need for technical support. Will we get there? Not for 10+ years. But we will get there. The whole point of working IT now is to make it fast, reliable, cost effective. If that means less technical support required - so be it. Harsh but true. Are you suggesting we purposefully keep our ICT systems unreliable just to keep ourselves in jobs? I hope not! Sorry - but that's juts the way the world works, when the miners were on strike, it was inevitable that all the pits would close. No amount of strike action would make any difference. Butuz

Lol - I'm only saying - if it is done properly it will work, and give each school a fast, reliable, very very cost effective network. Whether most LEAs have the ability to do it properly on the other hand, is a whole different ball game. I suspect not. Butuz

Good points. I would say that if you are providing centralised ICT services for a whole LEA, i.e all primary, secondary, special, librarys etc you would definatly want at least two redundant datacentres. Modern SANs and Vitualisation make redundant datacentres far cheaper and easier to set up than they once were. All eggs in one datacentre is never a good idea! Even I am trying to get a second server room set up in my school which can act as a redundant backup incase the main server room should ever somehow be destroyed. Butuz

Ah was hoping to come visit if you were based in Wales. Would like to see Sun Rays / SGD in action without having to travel hundreds of miles No one round 'ere seems to have it! Butuz

The thing is - if your centralising the infrastructure across the authority, the cost savings in initial purchase cost, replacement lifecycle, electricity usage, support costs, by replacing thousands of 100watt fat clients with 6watt thin clients will give the LEA an enormous pot of money with which to spend some of it on the WAN infrastructure. I would expect dual redundant 100mbit lines at least. Large multinational companies do this kind of centralised consolidation every day and have been for the last 10 years. It works, and with recent advancements in server hardware, virtualisation, and improvements in desktop and app delivery, it will continue to work even better. Butuz

Nope! Butuz