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We use Geode Networks and have been very pleased with the service: Geode Networks - Home Cheers!

We had that before (during a stretch where there was no management in place) - when we came to test the backups, not a single one actually worked. Terrifying.

We have more and more heading to offsite - we just replaced our SAN about a year ago and I suspect that's the last time we ever will. It takes a change in mindset and a lot of buy in from the teachers to the T&L benefits (of which there are many!) but the move to GAfE has been transformational and really worked for us and is gathering momentum nicely. Conversely though I was in a school last week that won't entertain the idea of off-siting key services and that approach works for them! Cheers, James

We bought Veeam and have been incredibly happy with that running to our Windows 2012 R2 backup server, it's insanely quick and very easy to use. We then use BackupExec to offsite it to tape but only because I'm yet to look at Veeam doing it. We purchased from www.ict4.co.uk who gave us a lot of pre-sales help and advice before we made the jump and have been very happy.

We get ours from iCT4 Limited based in Cornwall. They beat everyone else's price, were VERY helpful and made sure we had the right stuff. Recommended! www.ict4.co.uk

We use this - works well for us! Web Security - CensorNet

Yep! Fixed! I moved the SIMS storage out of the cluster and onto a local RAID array with SSDs Now we are back in business and it takes 5-10 seconds to access parts of SIKS that took upwards of a minute. I still feel it could be faster but it's much more useable.

Hi Steve, If you're in the South West, you'd be crazy NOT to speak to iCT4 - iCT4 - IT Support in Cornwall We use these guys and they are genuinely the best thing we ever did - the service is just superb. No commercial link to them...but I can't speak highly enough of them! Cheers, James

Using it here, LOVING it. NOT perfect (only available for teachers, not TAs, that's a pain...) and we had an issue with it not saving registers which seems to have gone away but generally good. It's a bit laggy so not sure if that's a network issue or just the fact it's early days for the app. Overall we are impressed.

What do they need to access?

Ah okay, so you're not looking at digitising existing content but instead bouncing around the FTA services? In theory, what would be your maximum concurrent users do you think? There are some consumer-grade devices that might be able to help but would probably not scale well. Is access to iPlayer etc. not deemed good enough? More and more systems are moving towards live streams of their channels, I believe the replacement for 4OD is one example of this happening.

I'm just up the road from you and have a lot of experience with VLEs (and used to work for one!) - if you wanted me to pop in for a chat, you'd be more than welcome? Happy to give you some advice based on my experiences from a T&L perspective? DM me if so... Cheers, James

What is/are your objective(s)? Sorry to sound flippant, but if we understand that we can make recommendations based on things other than cost too! Cheers, James

I've never really liked the interface of Edmodo - it fulfilled a need but I've never really warmed to how it works... Classroom + Google Drive + Google Docs on a Chromebook or iOS Device will be a real winner I think, especially as the iOS apps have kept improving! I'm pretty impressed with the pace of development from Google - healthy competition from O365 is a factor, I would assume!

In my opinion ALL VLE/Learning Platforms will be needing to re-assess their position in light of the growing strength of Classroom. I'll be VERY glad to see the back of Moodle, this is purely my opinion but it's the perfect example of a system designed by administrators that doesn't suit the classroom (I know there are companies that round off the edges and customise so I'm not including them in this). I also think it's a good wakeup call for the likes of Frog/Firefly and that should lead to their products getting better and really trying to innovate rather than introducing 'me too' features or gimmicks that may have been a characteristic of previous development. I do believe there's still a place for premium VLEs *if* they adopt this approach and are responsive to their customers. It helps that we are a GAfE school already but Classroom makes it an even more compelling argument - our current approach is to wait for it to mature and include some of the things that support OUR Academy vision, so we're sticking with our VLE for now. There will need to be a conversation once these features arrive though as the Drive and Docs integration is (naturally) so good! Exciting times.

AT Computers (Tewkesbury) have been fantastic for our Apple stuff. Otherwise, I source laptops from whoever is cheapest, or buy refurb - sometimes ICT Direct but tbh their service can be patchy so I'm using IJT Direct at times depending on price. Server-wise, I get my stuff (Dell) from iCT4 - the prices are always excellent and the service is SUPERB

Our old HP setup would continue to broadcast the SSIDs but no traffic was served

If you can get the AP model names, perhaps someone else here will have experience of them? Don't forget that it's density that matters too - contention for aerials can be an issue too, so you're gonna need to do some benchmarking whilst they are being hammered.

This is a 'finger in the air' opinion but I'd be suprised if a backbone upgrade actually resulted in significantly improved speeds if your APs aren't up to it. It might be worth spending some time benchmarking - wonder if you could cadge a loan Ubiquiti setup to do some testing? I know Meraki used to give you a free AP for watching their webinar! Don't get me wrong, gigabit backbone is important, no doubt but in terms of having to do the ONE THING that makes a significant improvement, I would be eyeing those APs and trying to do some benchmarking/stress tests. I can't see it helping matters much but I MAY have a couple of 24 port gigabit unmanaged switches (not PoE sadly) in a month or so - yours FoC if you can send a courier to collect. DM me if interested (it's pending signoff so may not happen!) - lack of PoE may mean they aren't any good to you... Cheers, James

Ah, I see - well, for our setup (three hypervisors all running multiple VMs, storage on SAN over fibre channel), I know I can throw as many vCPUs as I like towards any given VM but I believe they are only addressing the physical CPUs on the host they actually reside on...I guess I'm potentially confusing the situation by introducing virtualisation into the mix but I believe your assumptions re failover are probably on the money. REALLY daft question but what AV are you running and have you looked at excluding processes that you can deem as safe? It could be that AV is hogging a boatload of resources trying to scan the environment for each connected user? Cheers, James

No probs at all! Happy to help. Granted, our setup was NOT cheap (Meru WiFi, HP Switching) but sadly it's often the case that the system is only as good as it's weakest link eh?

Hmmm, this is a difficult one to call without knowing the budget available but my two cents says it'll never be a great user experience until the WiFi AND Infrastructure are sorted. Can we assume the clients are in decent health and fairly up to the job? If the majority of clients, sometimes up to 30, are hanging off one ap (?) then you're going to need some decent, well-configured kit - the APs will be hugely over-run otherwise. What about binning the HP setup and looking into Ubiquiti? I have NO experience of it (we use Meru and I've used Cisco stuff in the past) but hear very good things in terms of value for money. If these came in and you brought in something like the HP1910 or better then you'd have a good PoE switch that would allow you to VLAN if the network warranted it (either for security or performance or both!). I'd avoid unmanaged switches as they won't give you the flexibility. TBH, I'd be VERY tempted to look at bringing in a supplier to spec it out for you - pick someone stupidly expensive that you don't want to use, so that when you find something you ARE keen on, it looks good in comparison.

Top of my head, what about setting up a VM of something running PHP which you can then bin once complete and replace with a fresh one? Still a bit of a fuss but once you've a process in place, it'd be doable...Virtualbox maybe?

Is the RDS server a VM then? If so, what else is sitting on the same hypervisor? What services are published via the RD Gateway? What do the users generally do when accessing the server? If you remote on or connect yourself, does it FEEL slow? Metrics may be one thing but user experience is another and the CPU warnings *could* be disregarded if they are just spikes and no continuously maxxed out? I'd consider having a couple of (VM) RD servers available, maybe even spinning up another VM as the gateway but that's easy to say when I don't know your setup! What's the storage? I ask because on our old setup (plenty of CPU power) using a HP Blade and SAN, the disk throughput was so low, we were seeing CPU warnings...crazy - sorted out the storage (as a temporary thing before moving to a new setup entirely) and the warnings went away. Gotta love working in IT, right?

Fair point, but not necessarily reflective of my experience, although we are a small school - our entire art and media departments work on GAfE and are very happy. I'm not saying there are no changes to workflow, but they manage well and constantly evangelise about how much easier it makes things that they can access from home on any device. All that being said, for the sake of balance, they don't run any high-end courses that would generate insane amounts of data, our shares on GAfE for Media are still in the GBs not TBs. Cheers, James