Tallwood_6

iSCSI would look like the way to go especially now 10gbit ethernet equiped SAN's are becoming more affordable just dont skimp on the switches.

I see intel are now using sandforce controllers not there own in some of there lower end ssd drives like the new 330 so I think the only real difference will be in the quality of the memory used and the firmware applied. You have to be careful with the stats as a lot of the ones floating around for intel SSD's are for there previous generation drives which used SLC memory (more expensive and more reliable) not the MLC drives that are now mainstream. OCZ and Intel drives generally attract a different customer base as well and so will see different kinds of data and handling by customers.

I can certainly see learning from home become far more important in the future, however I don't see teachers and schools disappearing anytime soon. There is an awful lot after all that can't be taught or assessed sat in front of computer and as you have said schools are essentially day care and parents won't want to give up work and the goverment won't want to take that hit to the economy.

I'm with Dave_O on this one, I think visiting a site running a similar VDI setup to what your thinking of and getting the opinions of both techs and teachers would be a good idea.

I think there are economies of scales and you have to look at what you will be using it for i.e ICT suite library and evaluate.

Setting these up as standalowns and using RM Connector instead my be a potential solution.

Apparently only around a 3rd of SSDs are manufactured in thailand so prices where largely unaffected and if anything seem to have become more affordable in the last 6 months. I would take a processor downgrade and get an SSD myself and the reliability is there for drives from intel, crucial and Samsung.

I'm sure some of the edugeek sponsors would be happy to quote, Id be tempted to price up some DL380 G8 as well.

What kind of processor and hard disk do they have in them, 5400 or 7200rpm?

Not seen any of the latest EMC VNXe SANs but I've been really impressed with our Dell Equallogic great set of features easy, nice interface, good speed any touch wood no headaches with firmware upgrades. Only had to phone support once querying something and they where extremely quick and helpful.

HP elite 8200 core i5 4gb ram 120gb SSD 3 year warrenty well under £450 excl vat for just the base unit keyboard and mouse.

Just ordered some new HP's with factory fitted SSD's and was amazed at how reasonable the pricing came out. Planning to refurb a large batch of machines with SSD's over the summer you can get 64gig Cruicial or 90gb kingston SDD's quite cheaply now and the warrenties and reliability looks to be pretty solid now.

Its all very well packaging it up yourself but you will be missing all the office 2010 registry policies, i'd save yourself an awful lot of hassel and just buy the curriculum choice pack and get it done right after all pretty much everyone uses office.

We are running CC4 on our own ESX setup hosts and SAN not supplied by RM and have not had an issue with support or having them commission new virtual servers on our setup. I recon you will be fine in terms of support as long as you recognise its your responsibility to resolve issues pertaining to the virtual environment, commissioning of new RM servers on hyper-v may be an issue as I don’t believe this is a platform they are trained on however.

Sorry yes that's quite right I have to get the whole dataset concept out of my head.

Right here is my understanding from the launch event and meetings since: Progresso will only be offered as a hosted service to start with and the cost of moving to progresso from CMIS if you currently have a valid contract will be £0 however there will be a per pupil hosting cost which i dont have to hand. The onsite progresso hosting will be an option available in the future although they seemed to suggest that this is somthing geared more towards local authorities and the like rather than single sites. Only your current dataset will be migrated from CMIS so you will still need to keep CMIS kick around for a fair number of years either on a laptop or a virtual server. There is a service that serco will offer at a price to check over your current setup and do a bit of a data check do ensure that everything goes smoothly. I've have not heard anything about how long serco are willing to host the data for but in theory they should be keeping 6 years worth of data.

I think the requirements will vary depending on if your looking at having progresso hosted by Serco which i think the majority of people are looking at, or if your going to host it onsite yourself.

The first line is i believe entirely UK based but they just take your details and pass you on to 2nd line where you can get UK or India. If you log a call online its like rolling a dice as well.

I'm pretty sure that the RM Internet for Learning lot are all UK based, the usual RM support is split between UK and India.

"Windows® XP and Windows Vista® computers use NTLM v1.0 to authenticate while Windows 7 computers now use NTLM v2.0. The result is that when schools connect more Windows 7 computers to their RM SmartCache2 with NTLM authentication enabled, the number of issues are increased. We are aware that this is particularly disruptive when it affects a school." Full statement on the RM support website which i think its public

We use RM and apart from the virgin fibre install taking an age the support and service is better than what we got from the LEA, touch wood we have had less downtime as well and the new line is good for 1gbps so i'm told so much more future proof. We where using smartcache 2 universal, its cheap and effective but i wouldnt recommend it until they sort out the authentication issues.

Well i've ascertained that there is nothing up with either of my two wpad.dat files anyway so the problem looks to be with the ruckus delivery to the clients.

The DNS method is more widely supported across browsers apparently. You would have to have a machine joined to the domain called wpad, have removed the DNS exclusion for wpad and not have an existing record wpad in DNS for that exploit to work surely?

I've setup wpad to be delivered via DNS to test and this works fine for firefox and and internet explorer via a wired connection however it only seems to work for firefox via wireless which i'm slightly baffled by. The wireless WLAN i'm testing with has no ACL configured, no Enable captive portal/Web authentication or Client Isolation so i cant workout whats teh cause. The ZoneDirector auto config i still cant get to work for firefox or IE though.

I'm going to test delivery via DNS i just need to remove wpad from the DNS block list which MS seems to have added in a 2003 security update. I'm positive there is nothing wrong with the wpad.dat though, i've tried 2 versions one is a renamed proxy.pac that works for clients elsewhere and one i created from fresh which is much more basic but works when you point to it under 'Use automatic configuration script'. Has anyone else got it working from the zonedirector yet?