Butuz

You have to apply to SUN for it - or get a reseller like Cutter to apply for it on your behalf. It's judged by SUN on a case by case basis. But yes even though it does say its HE - schools on this very forum have bought lots of kit on matching grant. I think Ric_ is one of them. Butuz

Hehe exactly the same here! My mate who's a VMWare architect in a large company also reccomended XEN to me, particularly as I am planning on running Terminal Servers virtualised - he is testing Xen server against his existing VMWare system and he has been raving about the performance of his Xen terminal servers! Butuz

Nice one! Are you virtualising as well? Cheers Andrew

Reseller - The Cutter Project who specialise in SUN kit in UK schools. Send a PM to linescanner on this forum as that is Andy Trevor the Technical Director - he'll sort you out with whatever servers you want from a Single Opteron jobby with 4gb ram to a 8 way quad core beast with 128GB ram. I only discovered SUN servers a couple of weeks ago and after getting in touch and several long chats with Andy - it's been a revelation and is saving us £thousands. I was going to go with either HP or Dell - but frankly they don't exist any more as far as I am concerned. Butuz

Got a Sanyo PLC XU105 going up in the hall for a 10ft screen - a bit more expensive but wanted 4500 lumens as they sometimes run exams etc with the lights on and the LEA have just fitted brighter lights! Butuz

Oo there's new sun servers next week??? Glad you told me that! Butuz

To be frank - one good server or two cheap/old servers. It may physically run 3 servers without exploding - but you'll only get 5 mins max of actual run time in an emergency. I plan on having 20-30 minutes run time available if possible to cater for large brownouts or the like. Andrew

Out of interest Zoom - were you a tech or a network manager before tupe? And has your money gone down or up or same? Cheers Butuz

To be honest - there'as no point in doing unprepared last minute training for your teachers as it will do much more damage than good. If I were you I would cancel the training until you can either fully prepare - or cancel it all and move to moodle Butuz

To be honest you'd be insane to buy anything other than SUN at the moment what with their buy one get one free offers for schools! Butuz

That's a genius bit of kit. Well done that man Carter. Yes you need to make those brackets avaiable en masse - you may not have identified the above bracket as being required in your usual businesses you cater for - trust me school networks are far far more hostile than in any company you've ever been in. Security features are high up on the list for all schools, and indeed top of the list for many. If you could get those made for £4 - you should, possibly even include it in the price of the unit. Frankly it's an extra reason for schools to go axel compared to every other thin client. Butuz

All XP for the win! Butuz

Gonna be buying 2x load balancer this month. Butuz

Sorry - living in the past, have not even got a 2008 server here! Butuz

If your using the latest very thin thin clients that use 4 - 6 watts (e.g. axel M70 / M80) - you'll not only save lots of electricity, and use lots less heat, have lots less noise in the classroom, you also get a 10 year (or more!) lifecycle on the thin clients and reduced managment time due to easily being able to install software on just one terminal server rather than 30 fat clients, and being able to manage all your thin clients through the thin client management software. If course - you'll have to factor in the energy costs of the actual terminal server(s) into all your calculations but from my workings out even with the cost of the server infrastructure included you still save ~20% on initial purchase costs, and ~10% electricity etc. As electricity costs rise and rise the savings will become more apparent. Butuz

Yep - As Mark says - StnDeliv2.exe is the program that actually maps the network drives and printers during each user's log on. The RM Package name is "RM Stndeliv". If you were doing it via windows you would have to use log on scripts and it wouldn't work nearly as smoothly! Butuz

Wow - talk about being thrown in at the deep end Lucy! Sorry - no blades here so cannot be of any help! Butuz

Yep - I've been pouring over Dell SAN @ Servers for the last couple of weeks - but now I have discovered SUN servers and SAN's I'll never need to go to dell.co.uk again! Sun undercut Dell massiveley in education. Thats a very nice setup though - that is roughly what I was considering for my next big upgrade (before I found SUN that is!). Though I was looking at the PS5000x as the 15k drives are well overpriced, and the Poweredge R805 rather than the 2950. Let us know how you get on!!!! Andrew

Same position - although our budget dwindled really badly over the last two years (slashed to 10% of what it was in 05/06/07) which puts us in a much worse position now. Trying my best to work a 5 year replacement plan in but it's so hard when no one at the school really knows what we are going to need in 5 years - I have subjects appearing this year (BTEC) that all of a sudden need massive ICT resources such as a dedicatred suite, video editing facilities etc - of this has just appeared this year, how on earth do I plan for that 5 years at a time??? Andrew

TBH i'd be willing to wager the data isn't readable anyway even if you do get your hands on a Jaz drive. They barely lasted 10 minutes let alone 10 years Butuz

Yes I was looking at that one. 4 x 6 core CPU's is going to be a winner, and list prices seem at least 10% cheaper than the Dell R900. Two of these, and a 7110 would do me! Don't know where I am gonna get the money from though - but I figure if I have the plan constructed and costed then maybe the money can be found from somewhere. Butuz

Oh my god! How come I have not noticed SUN before! I never thought to ever look at SUN as I always saw their hardware as being very very high end all with strange sounding extremely expensive 300Mhz RISC processors that only ran Unix, only universitys could afford, and only the most highly bearded geeks could use! There's me looking at HP/Dell/etc for a new harware supplier to supply servers / SAN / etc and all of the time SUN is siting there with what looks to be an excellent range of Quad / 6 core Intel/AMD servers, some great SANs ranging from budget to bonkers money. Not only that but they also seem to do a crazily cheaply priced Core Quad Extreme workstation, and some rather well priced thin clients too! Not only that - but they offer 60 day trials on everything from a £1000 workstation to a £40k SAN. What the heck!!! Never seen anything like that before! Where have you been all my life SUN? Prices seem very keen to - I wonder if they do educational prices on top!!!! :cool: *creates sun.com account* Butuz

Hey guys looking to go on this along with a teacher - we are having our first LEA moodle training tomorrow and are keen to learn more - moodlemoot sounds perfect and good value too. Will hopefully confirm on Thursday and then book some accomodation! Butuz

All our hard drives are chopped into 3mm square cubes along with the rest of the PC! Butuz

But it would take 132 amps to charge your pack in 1 minute, 1584 amps to charge your pack in 5 seconds. What 12v PSU would you use to do that? By the way your lithium polymer packs should not be getting very hot during use. If they are, you might be overdischarging them, or not have enough airflow (plane or chopper?). Butuz