teejay

The free version of Office 365 for education isn't launched yet, due out any time.

Oh joy, my computing experience goes full circle, back to ZX81 style keyboards...

Another one escaping the delights of the UK, well done:) Still hatching my escape plan, not jealous at all:p

Sorry, didn't see this! We have the Outwell Columbia River, it's the polycotton version of the Nevada M. I think they only made it for a year and ended up paying not much more for it than the Nevada M's were going for. I know what you mean about the sloping corners, but it's fine for us, just the 2 of us in a 5 man tent gives us plenty of space! Only problem is, we were away a couple of weeks ago and we walked past a caravan sales place where we stopped for a coffee and then had a browse, Mrs Teejay now wants a caravan...

Solved with one repeat forever loop and one if then else. Toms thing about turning left is an important clue:p

Ideally you want both, Veeam to do the live backups of the VM's to disk and then Backup Exec or some other backup software to archive off onto tape or some other backup software.

Installing a high availability solution across 2 server rooms and an off-site location. I won't be getting a sun tan this year...

I'm driving, so will have space to take 4 to the conference from the Ibis.

Linux and Samba 4 are beginning to look like something worth investigating...

We still have a Windows 3.1 machine here, it runs the boiler system. We have air con in our office that heats as well as cools for a reason...

I'm sure after the evening networking session that someone will be bringing something up...

Oh, you need to make sure you've got good backups then or deep pockets to re-instate your support contract with Oracle.

Get onto Oracle support, it really is something they should be looking at. It could possibly be the motherboard, we had one where the SP failed on it.

The problem with Windows 8 is the Metro interface, that will put a lot of enterprises off straight away, tbh I've no plans to be moving to it after testing preview as it looks like it could well be Vista mk 2. I do tend to skip every other release of Windows anyway, got better things to do with our network. As for XP support costing more, I can see where they're going with that, our W7 client infrastructure has been rock solid compared to our previous XP clients, which needed an intricate spiders nest of patches, hacks and workarounds to get things to work properly.

Caravans are tempting but it's the storage of it for me, we just don't have the space for one. We have a lovely Outwell 5 man polycotton tent which does us great, have everything organised to be ready to go so if we decide last minute to head off and can get the tent up and everything unpacked in 30 minutes with just 2 of us.

Dell will, most others will if buying in quantity to order but not for off the shelf systems.

Yep, you're correct, any version will do as long as it's an OEM version or full retail version.

So the Mrs gets the house, you get the garage, sounds about right...

There are a lot of relatively cheap NAS type boxes that will do what you need, you could then run the DC on a much cheaper server and run the backup software as a vm pointing to the NAS. The P3 seriously wants skipping, that's at least 10 years old, don't rely on it at all!

The problem is Matt, Capita staff are selling Discover to school staff at meetings/conferences as the panacea for all reporting problems and can be used right now to solve all schools data analysis problems. The reality is that it's not that good at the moment, it's not the polished diamond that Capita make it out to be, it's more of an early beta which needs a lot of work on it still. It's also sold as a very easy to use data analysis package, suitable for SLT to play with, which if you need to go on a full days training course to figure out how to use it, then obviously this is incorrect.

Yep, 35 CALS in total. You could run on less ram, 4gb for most machines would be ok but ram is pretty cheap. 500Gb is a bit low and upgrading a raid array to more capacity is a complete pain, so would suggest you look at more space.

Your solution is about right, what I would say is don't skimp on the hardware, there are leasing options to spread the cost. What you have is a pretty resilient solution, so don't skimp on the number of servers. You can drop down to 1 quad core for the size of network and load, but that's not going to make a tremendous difference to price. If your looking at expanding to 150 users, your data is going to increase massively, I would allow 2TB, sounds big but your looking at a 5 fold increase in staff so that's 5 x 200Gb minimum. What I found when working in business is that as long as you can fully justify it, the business owners want the right solution which will work for the expected period of time, what they don't want is unexpected costs down the line, so if you are cutting back, make sure they fully understand there may be future expenditure and get that in writing.

Do you do drivers for Linux or Mac, looks like thy're only compatible with Windows.

Nasty sting in the tail there...

Flippin eck, I hope those two have a sample frozen as they won't be having kids any other way after doing that...