Butuz

As you can see by the response on this thread 1:7 is way behind what most schools are aiming for. 1:2 is a realistic ratio to achieve. 1:1 is over the top IMHO though congrats goes to schools that have achieved that. Butuz

Eep - can't register now? No late registrations? Butuz

Ah I see what you are trying to do now. I don't think it's possible without using the console. What I would suggest - is to install VmWare ESXi on an old but reasonably powerful workstation (or Xen if you have 64 bit workstaions) and you can then give the pupils full access to the VmWare Infrastructure Client just for that ESXi workstation. I know you use Xen but am suggesting ESXi because it installs ona wide range of 32 bit older hardware. I've got some "play around" ESXi server installed on 5 year old RM P4 workstations! Butuz

If I turn my air con off the server room goes from 20 to 30 degrees in 20 mins Butuz

As your with CC3 - if you want a soloution with no hastle to you RM do one based on MS Virtual PC 2004. RM.com Shop: MS Virtual PC 2004 for CC3/ST3 Solution Pack Butuz

Should just be able to remote desktop in as long as remote desktop is enabled. I can remote into my VM's. Will you be remoting into Windows XP Pro? Butuz

Lol they fresh-aired my server room when I originally managed to get it built. It took 5 years to get it built so I didnt kick up a hissy fit over air con. It sook 5 mins to melt the entire world though.... Biggest make ever. 4 Portable air con units later I am still pushing for reliable, powerful, permanant air con.... *sigh* Go for £2k worth of air con now IMHO. Butuz

Ha! Your a fine one to talk about nick names Phil "Hebdenlad" Lawrence? And we also have Andy "linescanner" Trevor........ where did those come from then lads? Butuz is a play on my surname - and it's been my nickname since my mates were old enough to talk! Now everyone calls me Butuz, friends, colleagues, friends parents, etc Excellent news - look forward to hearing more Phil. Butuz

Yes this is something I am particularly interested in. Phil - very big welcome to Edugeek. Will we have the ability to take our 7110s and plug in something like a J4200 or J4400 array, in order to repidly and easily expand the current storage with 7200, 10,000 or 15,000RPM SAS drives as and when we need them? Cheers Butuz

One thing that has not been brought up as a benefit of leasing is the fact that whatever money you have tied up in the lease is guaranteed to be paid by the school every year regardless of how bad the school money pot gets. I.e. if you have a lease where your paying £20,000 per year for 5 years - the SMT can't just come to you and say - "moneys bad this year, we're not paying the lease" like they can with internal school budgets. In effect the capital value of the lease is "protected" from SMT/bursar interference. If you do default on a payment the company come in and take all your leased equipment off you (in reality no school in their right mind is going to default a payment). This is a big benefit - and this is why we lease a lot of stuff, because sometimes we get given £60k per year for ICT and sometimes I get £5k per year (the last 2 years!), whereas our lease payments always go out on the dot and that capital value is always there for us to spend. The lease allows me to protect the long term funding for ICT, and also forward plan in a way that's impossible with the current budgets. I hate to think what ICT provision would be like here if we did not have a lease as we've had some very very lean years here and ICT is a big and easy target before going down the route of sacking staff. Big benefit. And worth the cost of the interest rates. Of course ideally we wouldn’t need to lease (and pay some fat cat company interest through the nose) - but this is not an ideal world I live in! Butuz

Hi mate. Hows it going? Agree with the others - definately install Windows 2003 from scratch. Never upgrade a box especially an old 2000 DC - it'll have all sorts of crud on it which will get carried over. Butuz

Based on how utterly pathetic the BBC's HD rollout has been on it's HD TV Channel - you'll be lucky to get any programs at all on the iplayer! Frankly the iPlayer aint anywhere near HD either. If your expecting a replacement for getting Freesat HD - you're gonna be dissapointed. Just becasue it says "HD" doesn't mean it is 1900x1080! Butuz

Thats bad news - the only person that can help you is your head - they have the power to fight for the extra pay for extra responsibilities. Have you actually had a copy of your job description? Is is significantly less? Undergoing job evaluation here too - no idea what scale I will be put on. Butuz

What about your Dell 3 year warranty? 3 years of trouble free computing? Butuz

I am loving this new list - this is gonna save me a good chunk hopefully! So glad they've dropped the prices on TFT's. Butuz

Nice one Andy! Eeep looks like I've been using an out of date version! So basically ignore everything I said above :getmecoat: Butuz

Ooooo you nit picker you. Love it! Rails are £45 per server on matching grant. I believe warranty is 3 yr next day but dont quote me on that. The R200 has no LOM as standard, that will cost and extra £180 odd on top. Butuz

Yep agree with that one mate. It seems (to me) they've hit the nail on the head so hard theyre sitting back now. They need to get out a 16 x 300GB and 16 x 450GB 10k version to cater for schools that use alot more multimedia but still require the speed. Also maybe a 16 x 146 / 16 x 300GB 15k v version for those that want ultimate I/O. Why dont they do the options? Slapping in 16 different hard disks is so easy. I don't get it myself. Butuz

Trust me - I know where sparky is now - I've spent the last 7 years trying to prize meagre amounts of money out of school leaders for extremely important projects. Sparky needs to get across the scope and impact of the changes he will make with this £10k – a meagre sum of money. First - define meagre? I would call £10k meagre when you consider the whole school impact of the project over the next 5 years. If sparky is in a large comp the school could easily be turning over £3million per year annually. If the proposal has a 5 year shelf life, that works out at £2100 per year. Two Thousand One Hundred pounds out of your £3million per year budget in order to implement a fast, reliable, manageable, eco friendly infrastructure that underpins everything the school does, and will benefit every single learner, teacher, administrator and manager in the school. All of this for the price of one activboard per year? All this for the price of 5 PC’s per year? Bargain. Now saying no to that is just meagre penny pinching. And we have not even gone into the total cost of ownership benefits that virtualisation can bring in the long term 1. Less servers to keep in warranty. 2. Less servers to replace every 5 years 3. Lower electricity costs 4. Less air conditioning needed 5. Easier management 6. Provides a platform to build upon in the future (good foundations as I like to call it, and we all know what happens if you skimp on the foundations….) And of course let’s not forget the biggest benefit to the whole lot – high availability. Butuz

When you say "Virtualise Everything" exactly what do you mean? Be careful about cutting costs - the last thing you want to do is actually reduce performance. What storage software are you planning on using on your PE2950s to actually make them a "SAN"? Be aware that shoving a load of disks into any old Win2k8 server does not magically make a SAN, especially if we're talking about a comparison with the Sun 7110 which is a ground up purpose build high performance storage system with super easy management, full redundancy, self healing and easy expansion options. How are your nodes going to connect to the PE2950s via iSCSI? How are your PE2950s going to synchronise the data between themselves in real time. How do you know the 5 x slow 7200rpm drives will give you the performance and reliability you need? How are you going to expand the SAN when you run out of room? The SAN is the cornerstone of your virtualisation effort, and skimping on it to save a grand or two is probably not a good idea. Of course - it depends on what you need, if your only virtualising a few low use servers then what you have suggested will be fine, if on the other hand you are virtualising many servers of differering types (domain controller, terminal server, web, exchange, SIMS, etc) then, in my humble oppinion, ignoring the 7110s and shaving £3k odd off the final price is going to come back and bite you in the bum good and hard in the future, when you need performance, or you need expandability, and you have neither. Lets do an alternative costing on based on the Matching Grant prices Linescanner can provide: Storage: 2 x Sun 7110 (16 x 146GB, Quad Core Opteron, 8GB RAM, 4 x Gig-E ports) @ £4300 Each 2 x Sun Fire X2200M2 (2 x Quad Core Opteron 1.9, 8GB RAM, 4 x Gig-E ports, no HDD) @ £775 Each 4 x 73GB 10KRPM SAS Drive for above @ £105 Each Total = £10570, so thats £2570 extra. But for that £2750 extra you get Mirrored SAN's that are super fast, super easy to expand in the future, and super easy to set up and manage now, and you also get two nodes that are twice as powerful as the dell units. Thats my 2p anyway. Whether you need the extra speed/reliability/managability the above can provide is up to you! Butuz

10 Servers 350 Desktops 20 Laptops 33 IWB's 40 Printers etc 1 Full Time Technician 1 Full Time Network Manager

I shut mine down during swap coz I'm a scaredy cat Butuz

As Jin Says - you don't need to be a qualified mechanic to drive a car. With ICT we should be aiming for the fact that you shouldn't need to be a qualified Techncician or have to recieve mass training just to use the computers. It's a long way off though! I'd say 5-10 years! Butuz

Are you trying to display full screen video / animation / multimedia etc on the thin client? Thin clients generally struggle with multimedia. Butuz

It can be done but you'd have to spend a LOT of money on the storage and network infrastructure. Firstly, spindle quantity will be king. I would suggest 2 x Sun 7110 SANs as they are buy one get one free. Set one of them up as the initial video staging area with all 14 disks in Raid0. Set the other up as a Raid5 mirror which archived the data off the Raid0 SAN every night. You'd also need to go 10GBE between the two SANS and 10GBE all the way to the Video Editing Suite with 1GB link per client. Of course that only actually gives you 2TB of editing space and 1.8GB of archive storage which probably won't be enough - but it'll be damn fast and good value for around £12k list price all in with the networking If money's no object look at something like a Sun 7210 SAN - 47 x 500GB SATA disks set up in Raid 10 to give just inder 6GB of storage, AND these models come with an 18GB Solid State Flash Accelerator and 64GB of ram which will mean the server should be able to cache a fair chunk of the video being sent back and fore. The price will be Juicy though - £55k list price for the storage server (though I dare say Andy at Cutter Project could knock a few grand off that for you) + the 10GBE stuff. Ouch! Maybe this post should be in the blue skies section? Butuz