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I've just had an email update from Google; adjusting their T+C's. If you set to EU only then data will only reside in the EU; but "customer data" (not data storage) may be cached 'transiently' in other countries. https://cloud.google.com/terms/service-terms

@localzuk. I appreciate you have your own issues with Google and that you have done a risk assessment and decided it isn't for you. Bear in mind that if Google loose your data you probably won't loose anything except reputation since safeharbour and the DFE have done the risk assessment in any case. One thing I can be 100% sure of is that Google have an awful lot more to loose in terms of reputation and money than you do. It's for these reasons (and the contract!) that I do trust the service.

It says that safeharbour is exempt from this requirement as they have been vetted by the EU.

Yeah. Now post the windows one, the SIMS one, and the one from the providers that you just costed at £5k.

here are the Google contracts we signed up for https://www.google.com/intx/en/work/apps/terms/dpa_terms.html Google Apps

Actually the contract says they would have to give you six months to migrate the data before they could terminate the service. oh I see, it's a personal problem that you have with large companies. I thought as much.

Yes and eventually we decided to force a password reset and sync everyone's GAFE account passwords. It ended up fixing a lot of problems that we had with ios devices too. I would recommend doing this.

GAFE is free storage for schools.

Yes I'm afraid that is the case.

It is per concurrent user. The initial cost is high, (circa £200 per license) but ongoing costs are quite reasonable. So you will need to view this for the long term and take into account the fact that management is more simple than for windows desktop clients. You will also need Windows terminal services licenses.

We have this with Centos7. The procedure is basically to join the machine to the domain: realm join -v example.domain.com -U administrator Then add a line to the skeleton profile: /etc/skel/.bash_profile gvfs-mount smb://servername/homes (maps to individual username, I'm not sure if this will work on windows servers - ours are linux, you may be able to mess around with $username ?) gvfs-mount smb://servername/sharename It may be slightly different on Ubuntu, I've only used Centos for School Desktops.

If you can stretch to Citrix Xenapp licenses then I would strongly recommend doing so. The ICA HDX protocol is vastly superior to RDP and the difference in user experience is noticeable. We deploy our own built "zero configuration" HTML5 Citrix receiver to anyone who logs into a chromebox/ook and login to cloud based windows apps is a couple of clicks away whether at home or in school.

I see. In reality I think there is little distinction if the applications (virtual servers) are secure and isolated which I understand they are. Plus there are scalability benefits to sharing the infrastructure to cope better with peak demands and lower costs at low usage.

I thought that was what we were discussing with Google/Azure/AWS

Thanks for that, I was thinking of doing a HA cluster and building the machines from scratch (moodle, webserver to start) then shutting down the local ones if it looked feasible.

I don't think we can regard anything in ICT as a 'one off', pretty much everything has an ongoing cost and more and more school software is moving to subscription based.

This exists already. SMART-AMP runs entirely in the cloud, students can interact with the whiteboard software on their own devices and it all runs from GAFE. http://www.risingsoftware.com/cloud/

So in the olden days people would download a file from a share, open it, add some images and the like and then re-upload the file (and all of it's associated xml gubbins) back to the server. This requires a certain amount of bandwidth. Nowadays people can edit the files directly in the cloud, since they are adding video/images directly in the cloud the amount of bandwidth used is LESS than it was using the old model. I suspect the same is possible with VDI where you just see the screendumps of the desktop images (small) and not the entire files (large) and all the processsing/files are stored on Microsoft/AWS/Google So that is my vision of how it will look in the future. BTW try and not take everything i say so aggressively. It is only a suggestion/vision.

This is how your mindset is working now, but it doesn't have to be this way in the future. If all of your data is already in the cloud and the workstation is in the cloud then it changes the data requirements significantly.

ok, thanks. I didn't get that impression because they seem to support the whole stack: [h=3]Eligibility requirements[/h]To take advantage of this benefit, the following conditions apply: All Microsoft Server application products migrated to Google Cloud Platform via the License Mobility through Software Assurance program must be covered with active Software Assurance (SA). The server applications must be on the list of eligible products. The list includes: MS Exchange Server SharePoint Server SQL Server Standard Edition SQL Server Enterprise Edition Lync Server System Center Server Dynamics CRM Server Dynamics AX Server MS Project Server Visual Studio Deployment Visual Studio Team Foundation Server BizTalk Server Forefront Identity Manager Forefront Unified Access Gateway Remote Desktop Services

It's probably not the bandwidth that would be the problem with the VDI - latency will be the issue here.

GTECH, Misco, XMA are all google partners

We use AD authentication on Wifi to determine which group a student is in. The Active directory group then determines which VLAN to put the student in. The wifi controller then forwards an identification packet to the smoothwall that then puts them into the correct group for filtering. The proxy is transparent (but identified by AD) via WCCP. I think this is what you want to do ?

Out of interest, did you compare Google compute engine? Just we have a lot of Google services and in some respect it seems a good idea to keep all in one place (and a bad idea from another perspective!) How does the pricing/SLA compare ?

^ I think this is true for a lot of things, but remember that working online using technologies such as Citrix and Google apps actually requires surprisingly little bandwidth - and redundancy is key in this situation. Video editing and similar will have very different requirements.