Butuz

Are you ok mate? Butuz

Is an iPad suitable for delivering content in a classroom? Yes to a certain extent. Though I am not sure what my teachers would say if I rolled out iPads across the school when they tried to open their hundreds of ActifStudio flipcharts.... Is an iPad suitable for creating that content/lesson resources? No. Not at all. Not one bit. Butuz

Yes my servers are virtualised on VMWare ESXi and as standard it gives you the ability to view these nice easy to read graphs of the last hour's performance on whatever option you want to look at (CPU, RAM, HDD, NETWORK, etc). Cheers Butuz

Hey dudes didn't notice this Hifi thread till now. I like a bit of music in the evening to relax after a hectic day in school!!! Source1: Apple Macbook Pro via USB into DAC Source2: Cambridge Audio Azur 640c V2 as transport via Coaxial Digital into DAC Source3; XBOX 360 Elite via Optical Digital into DAC DAC: Beresford TC-7520 internally modified and with 15v LithiumPolymer Battery Supply. Power Amp: XTZ Divine AP-100 running in 50w/chanel ClassA mode. Speakers: Tannoy DC3000 from 1991 Sorry about the terrible pics. I really need to take some good ones!!!! Butuz

To be honest if you get 8GB or 16GB of RAM in there with a 64bit O/S and SQL 2008 Std your hard drives will barely be touched. Have a look at a graph of my hard drives now that I have upgraded to 8GB RAM and fit the entire SIMS and FMS databases in RAM. Disks are just ticking over. Butuz

Oops - I missed the fact your using SQL 2008 Express. Teach me to read!! As Hecate says - that is your first port of call. Upgrade to SQL 2008 Std. Butuz

I wouldn’t use SSDs for an SQL server as their lifespan is considerably affected by how much data is written back to disk - and a SIMS SQL server does a massive amount of writing to disk which means the SSD's may not last long. I think your best value performance increase would be from moving to Windows 2003 x64 or Windows 2008 and Sql 2008. Moving to 64 bit means SQl can address the full 8GB ram (or 16 if you upgrade) and thus fit the entire working dataset into RAM which will speed things up no end. It looks as if your running SAS drives (not SATA due to the fact 146GB is usually a SAS size). You don't have much hard drive upgrade path other than to see if you are running 10,000rpm SAS drives or 15,000. If your on 10k you could upgrade both disks to 15k whilst your rebuilding the server on 64 bit. But that’s a fair bit of expense for not much performance increase. Other than that it's new server time really. Butuz

I'll 4th the motion to use SAS drives instead of SATA. IF you only have one server and a few drives serving the entire school you need to make sure the drives are as fast and reliable as possible and that means SAS. Butuz

To be honest the OCZ Vertex 1 are nearly the same price as the Onyx and yet have double the read performance. I have Vertex 1's and they are very good for the money. Excellent read performance and OK write performance. Read is what you mostly need for a workstation drive. Butuz

Fair play - impressive especially the battery price!!! Blog it up!!! Butuz

Ah if you can do it for £100 then fair enough. Mind you I'm very suprised you can get RAM, CPU, Batery, HDD, bluetooth and wireless for £100!!! Am I the only person that actually thinks the on screen keyboard in landscape mode on the iPad is fine??? I can type just as quickly (or should that be slowly??) on my iPad as I can on my PC! Maybe I am just a freak Butuz

Sounds like a fun project but I do have to question the logic of spending £300-£500 upgrading a totally out of date 2 generations old bit of kit when you could just spend the money on a new tablet? I mean iPad1's are a shade over £300 now and boy I wouldnt swap mine for a Q1. Butuz

Ok so you cant do the jailbreak. I guess you have two options. 1. use some kind of remote desktop / virtual desktop / virtual internet explorer 8 app deployment method (vmware, citrix etc?) 2. Put pressure on apple to enable the iPad to be far more educationally useful by allowing it to run flash? I would imagine as an Apple Trust you'd be in a better position to get your pressure noticed than most of us. I purchased my iPad knowing full well that it would not run flash. Did you know it woulldn't run flash when you bought yours?? Cheers Butuz

I think you may be better off finding some way to get flash working on the iPads (can you do that with Jailbreak??)rather than trying to get the whole Internet to stop using flash - which frankly isn't gonna happen. Butuz

I'd go for Crucial C300 @ around £140. Butuz

Infinitely more expensive than £0 per game Butuz

Theyre much of a muchness, so IMHO just pick the one that uses the least power. Butuz

Assuming you want to stick physical - I would go for more, smaller drives in each server rather than few, larger drives. E.g instead of 4 x 300gb go for 10 x 160gb and keep one as a hot spare. This will yield roughly the same capacity but will be MUCH faster in use and more reliable (hot spare is a REALLY good idea if you don't like downtime or performing full server recoveries). Other than that - looks good! Butuz

Excelent Tips. 1. Make sure you are not using SQL 2008 Express or SIMS will only be able to use One CPU and 4Gb Ram. Also - ensure you have as many CPUs as you can (my sims server gets 4) and preferably ensure you are running Windows 2003 64 bit so you can use 8GB or more of RAM (SWL will cache the database in RAM speeding everything up loads). Preferably don't use RAID 5 either as it has very poor write performance. Raid 10 would be better. We dont seem to have performance issue (4cpu, 8Gb RAM, Triple Parity Raid) and all of our teachers use the little home page graphs. Butuz

2 DC's should be all you need (assuming they are decent spec I.e Dual quad core 4GB or more RAM preferably 10 x HDD in Raid). Butuz

Speak to Axel as I would imagine this is a use for thin clients that the majority of schools wouldn't have considered / attempted. I would advise against it though. Even if the Axel can cope you will saturate your server back end fairly quickly depending on what video conferencing software you use. Butuz

Yay!

Good updates - I was not aware of the SIA actions against Oracle. And thanks for the Phone call earlier Andy, much appreciated. Butuz

Not 100%, but I am sure SIMS uses HTTP to deliver reports/documents. Butuz

Hi Pete. That sounds ineteresting. Which issue of Computer Weekly are you talking about? Cheers