alttab

the kicker with FC is the price of those single port HBA's. Others might baulk at the cost of FC switches, but if you were to compare with the price of a 10gbps FCoE switches and CNA's then the whole 8gbps FC package is reasonable for what is near-as-damn-it 10gbps speeds. And much more than your ever going to conceivably utilise. i still like FC as a SAN solution, it's elegant and not very difficult to setup. in terms of investment protection, 8gbps FC products aren't disappearing anytime soon, the installed base of FC solutions is vast. Really in schools your not going to go much beyond 3 hyper-v hosts in most circumstances, so the point about HBA cost is moot if you've the budget to factor the cost of cards in on initial purchase. 6 NICs doesn't sound like overkill for an iscsi solution. Never thought about having teamed NICs for the heartbeat network, doesn't sound a bad idea. As a new entrant into SANs without needing to maintain connectivity to existing FC products it would make sense to go with iSCSI, but i wouldn't consider FC a legacy or backward step in any sense. IT's just that at the budget you have for an array you may get more bang for your buck with iscsi.

to be honest, i think i'd skip the 13.3 inch macbook pro anyway in favour of an ivy bridge update to the 13.3 inch macbook air. having an optical drive or a firewire port isn't really a reason to opt for a device these days anyway. the only reason i can see for going for the macbook pro 13.3 inch is if it was considerably cheaper than the air even with the supposed ivy bridge specs. basically, once they figured out they could add a second usb port AND sd card slot to the mba and updated with the i5/i7 chips the macbook air became the pound-for-pound king of notebooks. I'd consider a 15inch macbook pro IF it came in considerably lighter than the current model but it remains to be seen whether it's clearly distinguishable from the mba with much more horsepower, or whether it'll be something designed to steal the thunder from the Samsung series 9 15inch models with a design refresh. the current macbook pro does need a design refresh to make it look as svelte as the larger series 9 model. aswell, it's going to be a case of apple being careful not to eat up any other of it's existing product lines with any new designs it comes up with.

i read somewhere that there would be 'hinge issues' were they to release a 15-inch macbook pro as tapered slim as the mba (in effect a 15-inch mba) which is a shame, as removing the optical drive you'd hope for an ultrabook style thin ANd light design. although the biggest bonus would be shedding some pounds off the 15inch rather than it being ultra thin a priority.

On a full sized 42u rack i've found what works for me is having the switch at the back but not at the top of the rack. So only a few levels up from where the servers would be mounted. that way you can get away with mostly using 1m cables..the 2m for stuff that needs to be networked toward the bottom and still route them correctly. on a small 22u rack you should be alright mounting the switch at the very top. having switches at the front never really worked for me. it wasn't a great effort to walk a metre or so to have a look at the back - assuming you've got the space to look at what's going on round the back!!!! the number of places i've been into where there's barely the room to squeeze your head between the back of the rack and the wall.

surely, having to install .net 3.5 or not will depend on whether you have any apps that won't play with .net 4 ? Or am i being a bit simple. As for the whole thing regarding guiless apps, again that depends on what third party software you plan on running on your win2012 servers. I imagine that most software you need to run that isn't covered by a win server role will be updated pretty quickly, free or paid. Given the timing of the release, i think it unlikely that you'll be looking at planning a forklift upgrade of your server to 2012 in 2012 or first quarter of 2013, a phased rollout of win2008 seemed to be quite common. Especially starting off virtualization projects with win2008 and 2003 VM's. Win2012 as a hyper-v host sounds an ideal use case. the pessimism i understand, this trying to straddle the world of the tabled and traditional PC on the client does feel more than a little disjointed, but the idea of remote management of servers has been a staple for some time. Taken it to the next level was inevitable.

what about DPM as an alternative to veeam and BE for schools ? presumably it plays nice with hyper-v, pretty cheap also. thoughts ?

well. school teaching leadership can somewhat get their heads around the job of the business manager. Dealing with finance issues, contractors who do stuff that involves making a racket, and so on. a lot of principals will have some experience of. Whereas the job of the network manager is this black box to many. These days conjuring up innocent enough questions about why this stuff that the NM dabbles in can't be moved to the amorphous cloud.

i agree, using the existing external virtual switch would seem to be the best bet. if network performance is a concern i'd look at the feasibility of teaming the two network ports, although i think the recommendation is for the parent partition to have a dedicated NIC. Not sure how prevalent that is on not heavily utilised hosts.

but surely trainee teachers are trained by the established teaching fraternity, so i don't know how you'd go about educating them if they are there to presumably be skilled on understanding their own jobs and roles, not learning about others. i agree with bossman about the two-tiered aspect in schools. It's understandable in a way given the front line staff are teachers, but it's getting to the stage where there are significant pockets where the role of IT support has become another utility managed and/or implemented by outside suppliers (think the significant number of completed BSF schools, new labour academies, and PFI schools), so in those cases it's even harder to big up the role of the inschool ICT support because big money has already been spent on delivery by non-school employed 'professionals', and the Senior teaching staff calling the shots may turn around and ask what all the fuss is about, this procuring of ict lark that works to their satisfaction is something they can do with the guidance of their externally contracted suppliers, if you have enough dough to throw at the problem. That in my view makes it harder for skilled professionalism to be recognised because the roles undertaken by onsite staff can be reduced to the lowest common demoninator. It's not as all pervasie as would be the case if BSF was allowed to run it's course, but there are enough new-style academies and new schools with big pots of money where the kind of investment their making in ict is thrashed out between Senior teaching leads and service providers, the ict professionals left in those schools may have very different roles than in other schools where the big money hasn't yet reached.

i just don't get what all the fuss is about Windows 7. Sure, it's an improvement over Vista, but that was improving on an abomination. The bar was low, and i have to say i may feel better about windows 7 deployment from a sysadmin point of view, but as a user i find my user experience and responsiveness is better by far when i'm using OSX on mac hardware. I still feel navigating around XP is more intuitive and personally i can do without the bloat that's been added to win7. Maybe i'm one of those users who's crying out for the performance increases of win8, the nice UI enhancements like ribbon in explorer, and it potentially having less resource requirements....and everyone else is just grateful that Windows 7 is not vista, that they've got their aero nonsense and fewer patches to deploy than XP sP3 ?

if your a business, and you've waited this long still on XP, why would you upgrade to 7 with Windows 8 just round the corner. Especially if, from a 'user productivity' perspective, the previews indicate win8 to be better performing in a number of areas. Plus it doesn't have more demanding minimum system requirements. Obviously they'd like to convince all about these supposed productivity benefits from moving to 7, well presumably companies want their users to remain productive that's why they've stuck with XP rather than disrupt. Wonder if they've factored in the cost of implementing training and the time taken to test, learn and fine tune the processes and infrastructure for Windows 7 when coming up with this x5 figure.... Companies have a timetable to work to if they want as far as moving off XP and will have a good enough idea of the merits of windows 8 well before the 2014 end of security updates for XP.

Apple Tv with analog-to-digital converters are still cheaper than replacing IWB with IWB or greenfield installs, surely ? I see the push toward apple tv's and LCD screens because a lot of teachers are really comfortable in using the iPad and hopefully creating engaging content. I remember the whole idea of a remote 'slate' to do interactivity with an IWB as seeming less than intuitive - tablets like the iPad do that far better without ever being dedicated to that particular purpose...if projecting wirelessly through an ATV is something that teachers are comfortable with I'm not quite sure what's wrong with biting the bullet and going with a hdmi projector if your talking about going the touchscreen route (which indicates you've got some money in the pot to do this) So no 'interactivity' in the traditional sense. Same if you wanted to go the LCD route, just get the most practical sized large TV you can find no touchscreen that adds weight and price. And leave the 'interactivity' confined to the device your sending the content from. simples.

HP has been declining very quickly, their laptops used to be good There's a lot more to HP's bow than just tablets. Obviously there's all this talk about HP's future direction in the PC and printer business (in addition to it's place in the 'post-pc' business) and then there's stuff like the autonomy acquisition which is more of a 'services' play. So it's a pretty diverse business, i don't know whether they're trying to emulate IBM and the direction ibm took....but ibm has done that very well. It's kept it's big iron business, selling stuff like BI and Database systems on top of that hardware in addition to being a major player in services. But then a few years ago selling off the PC business to lenovo, which doesn't seem to be doing badly of late. Not a bad deal all in all. If you think about it HP have a lot of equivalent stuff to what IBM offers in the mid to high end, plus it's got a much larger installed base of regular x86 servers. And it has services through acquisition....it's a company that has got a leading position in a lot of markets through acquisition. When a company has such a diverse range of products and services it's bound to have some areas that are more profitable than others,

yeah, we know that current schooling is stuck in a time warp, but a lot of how we go about day-to-day business in the uk doesn't seem to take advantage of what technology can offer. I see the miles of slow moving traffic on the other side of the A road going into the city centre first thing of a morning, and i question how many people *really* needed to be in their offices for that time that morning or attend that meeting they're trying to get to. Some of them need to be physically present somewhere, but we know that technology makes a lot of this stuff possible, Skype, redirecting phone lines. So much so that many more people could babysit their own kids instead of getting schools and after school clubs to do it!!!

it's hard to know where to put VDI clients. Do you implement as part of a rolling refresh programme targeting certain areas that you know need renewal. So, if ICT suite A is 8 years old and needed replacing last year do you replace 30 fat clients with 30 vdi clients....could be a possibility if you've got a couple of spare 96GB quad core xeon servers that can be the beginnings of a VDI farm. Would you even take the risk with VDI for ICT suite A if you thought there might be a need to do full frame rate video work ? OR how about a learning centre or admin staff machines when they need renewing, you know that no-one has ever done anything too demanding. So you could replace machines reaching their end-of-life with VDI, i think some kind of VDI and BYOD in small quantities is preferable to a rolling refresh programme that purely consists of replacing an old PC with a new PC.

well, they're hardly going to learn the soft skills that employers need 'studying' from home!! i certainly see a lot of the trends you talk about, but we all know old routines and methods have a habit of being quite firmly ingrained. like the piles of paper that inexplicably pile up in paperless offices :0) Or the people who always seem to end up working from the same hot desk.

BYOD maybe the future (i would argue it's A future along with many other things that people will continue to use) but presenting a windows desktop and scaling in down for the BYOD user to his or her smartphone or tablet isn't necessarily the future killer use case scenario (it may be a big deal to us geeks maybe less so for users who are embracing well designed mobile and web apps in increasing number), plus there are many ways to deliver business apps and shared areas besides VDI to non-smartphone BYODevices. These technologies often deployed in tandem with VDI, but also genuine alternatives. swell, if old x86 apps and the desktop desktop were the future of BYOD, why would Microsoft themselves spend so much time and money into making a touch based UI and HTML5 apps the front door to it's forthcoming OS for desktop, laptop and mobile. i wouldn't want to argue against the very big vdi rollout projects that i've read about, and it's fine for specific use cases. To me at the minute in schools it's a bit like going down the mac route, would you want to do genuine thin client VDI with more than 10% of your installed base, based on cost and user requirements ? If your talking about VDI for fat clients, well then desktop management has become sufficiently mature for means and ways to manage large numbers of fat windows7 clients without too much fuss...so much so that the argument for VDI seems to be that people have these massively over specced virtual servers where they've got their dozen or so school servers on to, underutilizing the rest of the hardware, the idea of centralizing desktops and marvelling at how cool it is to manage desktops from one central location is a compelling one. I don't think the user base are particularly grarteful ? Management would be grateful if you can show them the cost savings, but if your not saving energy where are you getting the cost savings.. ? and your potentially hampering the user base if they need to do something very demanding that the old way of working would chew up with no bother.

good point. think of all the costs associated with the training and CPD required to get teachers who move into SMT and headteacher positions merely up to speed on the beuracracy in education they need to know about, let alone the other functionally useful CPD which could train them to be competent business leaders. Professionals from industry already have a grounding in the latter.

although it seems like MS are banking on cracking the tablet market with a combo of Win8 and x86/arm tablets, if you leave aside the changes to the traditional Start Menu, is it not an evolution of Windows7 rather than something completely new ? Dropping aero doesn't make it a radically different departure from Windows 7, to that degree they've clearly thought about the new OS still needing to run on the millions of OEM pc's that will continue to be shipped every year. And so they're basing the success on the foundations of Windows 7. I would suggest that XP to Vista was a far bigger leap for consumers because various things were renamed or relocated. So much so that people who used nothing but xp for years would be forgiven if they were still thinking in xp-mode and struggling through navigating around windows 7. i would say what they're doing is really bold, and could be argued is a better approach than hiding some of the tablet-style features where only the curious would bother to explore and everyone else happily ignores and carries on using the new OS in the old ways because they are not compelled to do otherwise, which is arguably what you have had with the last couple of OSX releases.

for some reason i just don't find windows 7 as intuitive as OSX or XP. Some of the things i like like being able search for apps when typing them in via the 'run' area. But i don't find the explorer and folder organisation to be a big move forward, and the other stuff they have added don't make it a more sophisticated or intuitive OS than OSX. The one thing neither Microsoft or Apple have managed to crack is sorting out their respective file browsers, they've tinkered with them to varying degrees but they don't seem to have the confidence to redo the whole concept/design from the ground up. The two things that would convince me with Win 8 would be if they dropped the graphics bells and whistles from Windows 7, improved performance with less RAM, and the ribbon style interface in windows explorer is truly a big improvement. All those things, plus hypervisor in the client OS would convince me it's a better option than Win7, but only if the tile based navigation makes more not less productive. OR becomes more intuitive as a way to interact using a non-touch computer.

Rewarding teachers for taking on extra responsibility or for being outstanding teachers i sort of understand, although again it depends on the measures used to judge performance. But 55k or so (as is often the case with the 'asst head' role) is an awful lot of money to pay someone to be part of a leadership group with the division of responsibility that implies as being part of a 'team'. The individual buck stops here still rests with the head. IT just smacks of being the way to promote a few ambitious teachers into the 'boardroom' as it were. With Middling-executive pay to match, but with not necessarily the skills you'd expect of 'business leaders'. 'Cos that's what they are if they're making decisions on whole school improvement. then there were the one's that flew under the radar because they were outside of schools and filled by qualified teachers in the roles 'supporting' schools in some way or another. i consider many of these just as much a promotion route into middle-manager positions for teachers looking for an out. And positions that we can do without, because the cuts show that life goes on.

that school couldn't possibly afford to fill all those roles in Y1 were they subject to regular per-pupil funding model. Indeed, as someone commented, they'd fill in those roles as pupil intake increased...and fill them all in i've no doubt most schools would, the asst heads, the 'inclusion leaders' etc they'd all be there. But the funding model would have dictated that it not all be done in Y1. It's a given that those roles would exist for a 700+ school at those kind of salaries whether they be free, academy or pre-academy secondary. That mgmt structure is pretty much a baked in template these days (which i think is a point that is not often discussed), just not at 210 pupils!!! i've seen really bonkers examples of top heavy staffing structures. The examples i've seen came about as a result of some of the previous governments pet projects whereby the new initiative get's a disproportionately high portion of funding from the get go (so no change there then). This is another problem with the public sector, the way funds can be allocated leave you scratching your head, especially if it's a government project which is designed to occupy column inches. And some of the characters who are given autonomy at a local level to spend those funds equally leave you scratching your head, i don't blame them though. They're being promoted to positions that didn't need to be filled plus it means they don't have to spend several hours a day teaching several days a week...i wouldn't expect them not to apply or accept a one-way ticket to better pay, pointless meetings and housekeeping duties to occupy the time.

to be honest primary and secondary education has been awash with middle manager roles for years. also Plenty of management-graded jobs were were created outside of schools in some subdivision of the LEA or some centrally funded body for those who didn't like teaching kids on a day to day basis very much, to scuttle off to. On good money swell. The cuts have meant some of those have taken retirement or moved on, but those who've moved on can always be relied upon to advise schools based on years of experience in not teaching day in day out!! In schools themselves, i've always wondered about the need to create additional asst head roles in addition to traditional role of deputy heads and heads of years, whether it's a response to the increasing beuracracy. Management creating more management, and whether it's the inevitable result of a very performance-centric profession that it seems to have become.

to be honest i like the simplicity of it, i hated all the aeroglass and transparency distractions in windows 7. Anything that's more bling than functional is a step back in my view. The more inline with the windows 8 server mgmt UI the better, as i quite like the minimalism, if you can call it that. the metro UI also displays good design in my view, i just question the adaptation of the traditional start menu method of interaction using keyboard and mouse to tile based using keyboard and mouse, and whether it's square pegs and round holes. I suspect it won't be as bad as that. once people get round to the idea of exploring their files, managing apps and collecting groups of things together in tiles. I don't feel massively more productive with each successive iteration of the old start menu/desktop, so that might finally change with the metro ui if i'm forced to navigate in a different way.

pricey relative to what ? your not paying for a name at those prices, that's pretty standard for those number of available ports. Obviously a reseller might be able to quote you cheaper than advertised price. i've purchased 24 port 4/2/1 switches in the past (8 active) for between 2k-2.5k and i've thought them to be very reasonably priced, given it's fibre channel. It is what it is. If your shaping yourself up to go the fibre channel fabric route your looking to pay more than you would FC DAS or iSCSI.