coreykeeling

I agree with that but we don't control our network so we are restricted on what we can do. I can ask Entrust to add in a VLAN for wireless but if they will do it I don't know. Something to ask near the time.

Thanks everyone for your recommendations. I think we will use HP 2530-48G as access switches and then 2x2920 for the core switches. Currently we have no layer 3 switches and the cisco router does all the VLAN routing. I am not 100% sure if we will VLAN the wireless off or not at the moment but I can see it being a good idea but it is upto Entrust if they do that or not.

Currently we have a HP 2530-48G PoE as a core switch going over two 1Gbit copper ethernet trunks. We are not heavy on VLAN's here and only have the default and a Voice VLAN. We plan to have 30 APs and they could be Aruba, Meraki or Ruckus. We currently have 250 devices on the network with at least 60 going over wireless.

Thanks but we can;t use them. They have to be HP otherwise Entrust abandon network support to the school.

They do have a lifetime warranty but so do most like the meraki switches. Sadly we are locked out of them because of contracts with Entrust who only deal with HP.

We have recently been granted £7000 to replace our 5 switches and I would like to ask for some recommendations on HP switches. We currently have a mixture of HP 2610-24 and 48 port 10/100MB non PoE switches and would like to replace them with the HP 2530-48G and wondering if they would be a good fit or if to go with some other HP switches. We currently have 250 users on our current network using desktops, laptops, macs, iPads, CCTV and smartphones. Any recommendations would be welcome. Thanks

Thanks kennysarmy! This is what we were basically looking for and I like the idea of using a excel sheet instead of a text file so it is easier to sort through. Regards

Afternoon, I was wondering if anyone knows of any good software which can give me a report on the usage of computers? e.g. how many times has it been used in the last day/week/month. Regards

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and tips. I will discuss this with my colleagues next week and see what happens. Thanks again. Corey

The issue with that is costs. We do currently have a NAS BOX from RM but it has been used as a mass storage location were media and other content are dumped. I like the idea of having another NAS/SAN and have direct network connections from it to the two servers and use it to store students & staff network home folders which would offer us some flexibility in the future when we need to expand storage space again but I think that is unlikely to happen because of money.

We have 114 desktops and 40 laptops. 14 rooms which are general classrooms which have 5 computers in each except one that has 3 computers and are used everyday. One ICT suit of 16 desktops which is used less often. Science lab with 6 computers in. Staffroom with 5 computers. Then 16 computers used by SMT, Admin Staff, Nurse and Comms etc.

We have around 180 users on one server and 64 staff I think on a second server but it is something I will have to double check on Monday as well as monitor the concurrent access levels over the week. Thanks for that tip with resource monitor. Blackblaze have similar statistics that customer drives in a datacentre are not that bad. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/ Keep me updated on your SATA drive testbed if that is OK.

Hi Everyone, I have been using EduGeek for a few months now since I first started working as a IT technician in a high school and was wondering if you could help me. We currently have two windows servers 2008 which store staff and students network drives and for a few years other technician have been able to keep the storage under control but it is getting to a point were it is no longer a viable option and are looking to upgrade some of the hard drives in the servers. We currently have SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration but the servers do support SATA. I have looked at Enterprise SATA and SAS drives and see that SAS drives are more expensive for not a lot of capacity where I can get a 2TB Enterprise SATA drive for just over £100. Do you guys from experience have any recommendations on hard drives for windows servers? Anymore information you need please ask. Thanks.