Tallwood_6

Well if things are that much better abroad then why dont they bog off, more and more students and professionals are going into teaching profession at the moment looking for a safe haven given the current downturn so we wont be short of teachers in a year or 2 and most of these will be thankful to have a job.

If only i knew there was a service like that long ago.

Dont quite understand your beef with ruckus, you brought a controller without enough licences hows that ruckus's problem?

SUN kit certainly looks appealing but i'm a little worried what will happen when IBM takeover which is looking likely.

£24750, the 8212zl with a few extra modules would have set you back nearly that as well! Looks a very good setup indeed.

XP, Vista on CC4 is pretty appalling but amazingly cold boot is slightly quicker on the same hardware.

There maybe an arguement to swap out for cat6a as that will support 10gbit over 100meters so is very much future proof the advantage's of cat6 aren't especially great.

CC4 will kill your older stations and is still my biggest complaint, 600mb plus memory footprint before antivirus and any programs loaded, if your machines have less than a gig of ram 5 minute startups turn into 10-15 from cold. SR1 doesnt seem to offer any solutions to this either, we've been told it is something they are looking into sortly after however.

I have put the idea of implementing a SAN at least from RM on hold. I've since asked them to price me up a user storage server to replace an older DC and a D2D2T system which we could then use with a if we where to go ahead with one the following year. They are apparently looking into different SAN options for me and apparently they may be offering the EMC AX4 as an option for summer but i'm not sure what kind of pricing for that if they do offer it. Spoken with one of my local suppliers/ solution providers and they seem to think they should be sort us out with a SAN install, either HP, Dell or SUN for the money we are looking to spend as well as possibly virtualizing a number of servers at the same time so i'm weighing up my options. With the mess RM have made commissioning servers installing CC4 etc the last couple of years i'm of the opinion i may as well give someone else a shot, may even sort something else myself but i'd quite like a holiday this summer so will have to see!

Drive and printer mapping is done at startup, and can be done at the location or workstation level in the RMMC and remember that interitance applies.

Good to here you've got it all working, i've got them moving facility and eportal onto a server 2008 box with sql 2008 in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed all will go well.

Right ok, just to clarify you will need server 2008 licence, SQL processor licence x2 if you have dual Xeons, user CAL's for people accessing internally and CAL's or and external licence connector if you will have students, teachers and parents accessing eportal externally over IIS and a connection in our case to the resource passwords list for sercos hosted VLE. Pricing and Licensing Explains a little more, prehaps i'm a little anal but at least that covers all the bases.

Just buy a server 2008 external connector licence no need to buy cals for each external user only came to £230 when i brought a couple of weeks ago.

I'd personally aviod using the application wizard to package whenever possible, many apps now ship with msi's or admin install instructions where sitches or .ini files are used produce something which will easily install and just as importantly uninstall from workstations. I had an old system manager who insisted on always using the application wizard to produce applications and as the list slowly built the words (install failed & uninstall failed) became more and more common on the stations. She even managed to package up a bit of adware with one application which was then deployed site wide.

100Gb ethernet, blimey what kind of hardware would you need to saturate that kind of connection, i think in the short term the 10gbase-t stuff looks interesting a couple of companys already offer switch's SMC Networks - SMC8724-10BT TigerSwitchâ„¢ 10G PRODUCTS MANAGED SWITCHES STANDALONE 10G EN_USA and it you have buildings cabled with cat6a or cat7 your laughing.

With the D2D2T thats not to bad at all i may enquire, i was looking at the Dell EqualLogics, HP storage works units and even the Sun 7110's, i just get a little bit tired of being told what hardware i can and cant use, if RM can commission 3rd party servers why cant they do the same for SAN's. Just out of curiosity did you go with SATA for SAS drives in your Hitachi?

Looked at this, but future expansion looked a little limited, what kind of figures did they come back with for the hitachi. I.e. would i have change from 15k?

Anyone here using a SAN on CC4 or even CC3 which isn't RM supplied? Looking at implementing a SAN this year but having received budgetary quotes from RM but they want a criminal £50k plus for a 6TB EMC offering and thats without any real backup in the form of a Disk to Disk to Tape or similar which is simply way off the kind of money i was thinking of spending. I has asked if they would be willing to commission a slightly more reasonable 3rd part solution but they dont seem to want to know. So basically i'd be interested to here from anyone that as either managed to get RM to commission a 3rd party SAN or implemented one themselves that has been used to house user home directories?

Shouldnt be any problems, a number of CC3 sites use it without issue but as suggested i would trial it first.

This is true but the idea with Community Connect is RM supply all this in a single managed package. Where as in industry you would often need several different solutions to meet the same end. The reality is somewhat different however but what with RM winning most of the BSF soon alot will not have the choice.

Work wise maybe but certainly not cost, if you have CC3 you alreday have all the miscrosft CALS and server liecnecing without having to stump up an extra £ for the CC4 licening for stations servers and what not which is far from cheap. You can also ditch all the RM service contracts which saves if you so wished.

Have a couple of the HP3505s and HP3525n's, the 3525's are of a better build and the print quality a definate step up but the tonner costs for the new HP colours are quite a jump by comparison.

We had a CC4 upgrade from CC3 last July, probably one of the first to go head outside of field trials. After a summer of battling we have most of the problems now ironed out however CC4 still have a number of problems many of which i believe will still be present after SR1. The biggest one for me is the poor station startup and logon times from cold boot which is a particular problem on laptops and older stations and will definatly come as a shock for those comming from Vanilla Windows environments. There are also countless little buggy issues, the management console is slow and prone to crashing or throwing up random errors. The network recycle bin which many have purchased has been withdrawn and is still awaiting a fix, RM tutor which is a large part of the CC4 client costs is has only just been made usable the list goes on. I'm happy RM are on the right track now but they still have a long way to go to restore confidence in CC4 and certainly before i order anything from them anytime soon.

We have different filtering policies for staff and students, however staff internet usage is still reasonably tight. The fact your current school uses RM should have no impact on what may or may not be getting filtered, in fact there’s a good chance both schools are using the same LEA provided filtering setup. Unless you are having difficulty getting to the resources you need to teach with i fail to see you complaint, the schools Filtering policies are likely set and approved by the schools senior leadership. Sometimes you just have to accept that different school IT departments implement things differently.

What a joke, a 10% pay rise they should just be grateful that they work in a profession that is likely to be relatively untouched by a recession and a 2.3% rise is better than most will recieve. This just further demonstrates to me further how out of touch the profession is with industry. I know alot of people leaving uni this year with low hopes for employment looking to do a PGCE so far from being a shortage i can see the downturn bringing more students into teaching in the hope of safe employment.