Butuz

Yes I have to admit I have been quite shocked at the sensationalism of the BBC coverage. I'd expect it from the daily mail or sky but not from the BBC! just goes to show not alot will get int the way of a good* news story! * By good I mean good form the news ratings point of view, not good from any one elses point of view Butuz

Ideally you should have ALL your servers and ALL of your inter building connections (either fibre or cat6) connected directly into one core switch so that all buildings and servers are on the same backbone fabric for maximum performance. This means speccing a core switch large enough to deal with all of those connections. Simple answer is, how many 10gig links will you need, how many 1000base-fx links will you need, how many 1000base-t links will you need. Butuz

I think you need to make sure a crystal clear line is drawn between what you are expecting Capita to support directly and what will be supported by your own schools IT team (if you have one). For example you may dump the LEA an pay directly for capita support, but capita support probably won't be too interested in the day to day running of your SIMS system, such as applying patches and updates to your server and or workstations, they won't create/delete/set up users and permissions and they won't deal with backing up your sims databases or SIMS server. This is all stuff that the LEA would probably be involved with at some level - you could find that using capita directly could end up increasing workload on your IT staff significantly, that is assuming you have IT staff on site in the first place?? It's not so clear cut. I would not want to lose my LEA SIMS team support. They do hours and hours of SIMS work that I simply don't have to worry about.... Butuz

Lol - thats the same as saying: source:gossip or source:someones imagination Excellent thread and excellent articles by el reg. Butuz

Amazingly terrible pictures Butuz

75 printers here - never seen steam before!!! It must be your paper - it's not normal!!! Butuz

Glad you put that video up. The M80f is extremely capable even without any fancy and expensive backend add ons (citrix / remotefx etc). Basically the M80f and a Win2008 terminal server will do most things apart from full screen video playback and sound/video editing. This is a super cheap and excellent value way to deliver desktops to a large percentage of the school. TCO is about as low as you can get via this method. For deprtments that require more such as DT/ART/Music/IT you could use fat clients or virtual desktops and take the higher TCO on the chin. Butuz

A few years ago the kids in DT made a plaque for my door saying "[myname] is GOD." I liked it so much I put it up but a few weeks later the RE Dept made me take it down!!!! Butuz

....going a bit ga ga? He's been completely out of his tree for years!! Butuz

Single 1Gb link to each san here for VM storage and come no where near saturating a single link so far. Butuz

You'll only have more storage to play with as long as your RAID Card supports resizing/expansion of arrays. If it does not you'll end up with lots of free space but no way to use it. Butuz

You can use a bigger secondary drive but it will only use 80gb of however big the drive is. Butuz

Bristol or Birmingham is good and quite central! I'll hop in we can split the bridge bill joe Butuz

Was going round the school with a print company doing a print audit and hey presto came into a welsh room to find a projector left on, but not illuminated with all three lights on it flashing red. None of the buttons worked and I had to pull the plug out to shut it off!!!! I think that one be fried good and proper!! Butuz

Many devices use small amounts of elecricity when turned off. E.g PC's use some energy to enable wake on LAN functionality and the like. Switching them off at the plug is the only way to ensure 0.0 watts. Butuz

I like that one!!!! Butuz

Ah - thats different though as my argument would be not that "i must have the power and be UBER!!!" it would be "the school now no longer has the power and the random commercial company that's main aim is to make a profit at all costs now has the power and is be UBER!!!" wo betide if the education of pupils gets in the way of making a profit, satisfying shareholders, etc etc. Thats a whole different ball game and I am willing to wager that is what most NM's had the problem with in BSF (that and the fact they were being Tuped from a secure job into an unsecure job). Its not the NM losing the power, its the School. Butuz

I’m not so sure mate I think your getting standby and sleep confused. Standby is what it uses whilst powered on and warmed up i.e when not actually printing or not in sleep mode(eg in between print jobs in an ICT class). Sleep mode is long term power saving mode that usually kicks in after half an hour or so of not being used, for evening / weekend etc and this is the figure you need to use in order to do your evening / weekend electricity cost calculations. E.g. you state your Brother HL5250DN uses 80w in standby but again standby is not sleep. According to the specs it uses 9w in Sleep mode, so it's this 9w figure you need to use in your calculations otherwise your costings in your first post will be way off. Same goes for all your other printers/MFP's. Hope this helps! Butuz

Are you sure your measuring the watts in sleep mode on those? They seem incredibly high for the kind of sleeping that my printers do overnight / weekends / holidays. My Infotec ISC3030 uses 6.1 watts when it's sleeping and that is roughly the same size MFP as your Ricohs. But yes when it fires up it uses up to 1400 watts. Butuz

Whaaaa????? What printers have you got?? If your power figures are accurate then I suggest you sell them all on ebay now and buy some decent ones!!! 150w in standby is bonkers!!! I've measured a couple here and dont get any where near your figures: HP LaserJet 4250n (5 years old) gives: On and Ready: 15.5w Standby / Sleep: 9.3w Brother HL6050DN (2 years old) gives: On and Ready: 10.9w Standby / Sleep: 7.7w Are you sure your printers use 150w sleeping? Do they have a sleep mode that you need to enable?? Cheers Butuz

LEA is as far as any of our data will go. Butuz

The spec looks fine I think it will work well. A few points. No experience with overland here but in my humble experience do not skimp / build your own SAN, especially if you are only going to be using one SAN (single point of failure) - buy a proven vendor one with same or next day warranty and support. 10GBE is a good idea on your SAN especially if you think you may expand over the next 5 years. Bonded/trunked 1GBE has overheads and caveats with virtualisation software and in really high traffic situations 10GBE will be much better. Saying that I've not come close to satuating the 3 x 1GBE I use on each of my SANS (not bonded). Enjoy the benefits of virtuialisation, of which there are many!!! And it does not need to cost a fortune, infact it does not need to cost anything!!! You get 90% of the benefits of virtualisation for free with the free version of ESXi for example, the question I guess is are the other 10% of the benefits (high availability, automatic failover, etc) worth paying thousands upon thousands for. For my school (and personally I believe for most schools), the answer is no. Butuz

4 x APC SmartUPS 3000i with network management cards here with the servers staggered between the 4 UPS's so one UPS can fail totally with no effect on the servers. Works a treat and fairly cheap. (and it gets tested constantly!!!) Butuz

Did it involve asterisks???? Butuz

Wohoo!!!! We have a shill!!!! *bows down* Butuz