AlanD

I have been reading this with some interest...and fed some comments back to RM in relation about their recently released tec note - which basically was advising you to use Smart Client for PCs with NVMe. (Smart client - has always seemed to be a misnomer!) My own experience was that I can't even get SMART client to work with special Disk arrangements. In my case it was some high end work stations that had RAID drives for performance. Even with Windows 7 fully installed with all RAID drivers and working fine - the Smart client process fails :-( I told RM about it at the time - and didn't get much interest...apart from them telling me it should work. I don't think they have _actually_ tried it with CC4. Worked fine for CC3 though. Like the other comments above - I don't understand why the drivers can't be installed into the "pre" image (as well as the main windows image) so that it would work with a PXE boot....but right now I'd settle for it working with "not so smart" client.

Sitting here, smiling. We use RM. I not a huge fan, but I think it has some merit. Yes, I've noticed how much slicker a laptop becomes if you do a veneer install of windows on it. But once you put back AV, and group policies that give you some sensible lock down...they begin to feel much the same as they did with the RM software installed, which is perhaps not surprising. I think RM lost its way somewhat - possibly because they do not have enough serious competition - apart from do it yourself with Veneer Windows - which you can do of course...and I have done in the past. I think their unify product has some merit - synchronising passwords with O365 and google as well as dozens of education apps. (although I confess I did all this with Gads and Gaps and DirSync for free). Of course, it costs extra. And I think their new One drive desktop disk drive (It uses O365 drive as if you have a USB memory stick installed) is good too - although I have only seen it in preproduction so far. Their CC4 management layer still needs finishing off - bits don't work, or stop working, or are inconsistent...but its a one place shop for IT managers that don't know their way around Window servers. Despite using it, and being somewhat defensive of it - I do think its really hard to justify its cost. FWIW - I would start a new domain. Why wouldn't you?

Ooooh, all interesting stuff. Do you have the Intel DCS3610 in a RAID? Just for the OS? For normal storage? For Database? (I remember complaining to our MIS provider about a particular function - which was so slow....it often timed out. Apparently they hadn't realised this because their development servers all had SSDs! In reality...it was just badly written SQL...but that is the trouble when developers use fast kit, they get lazy and sloppy with their coding).

Yes - I accept that timely fixes are highly desirable these days - if not for classroom use then for Email. This is partly why we added a Virgin Cable connection - as I thought it was pretty unlikely that two different Internet Connection technologies - OpenReach Fibre and Virgin Cable would both fail. They even come in at different ends of the schools. Failing that - our router also has a USB socket that will take a 4G dongle - which would maintain Email access for us, and emergency web access. But even a leased line can be out effectively for a whole day before you get anyone to fix it, so you probably do want something else - and indeed as you say you have a 60Gb FTTC for this very purpose. So given that you still need the second connection - perhaps there is little merit in the service level on the first connection - and you could save £5000 a year by just having 2 x FTTC connections.

Anyone tried servers with SSD? It seems there are Sata Ssd which could give a useful life of more than 5 years even if you rewrote half the disk data each day. Not sure whether I would put them in a raid 5 or simple raid 0. Wouldn't take long to recover data from backup if a disk failed....and should be capable making things nippy for desktop clients...logging on speed sets. Or use a pic e adaptor with new m2 type drive. Not sure I would bother with redundancy...but perhaps others have different views?

Every year I revisit this question and get some competitive quotes. Seemingly every ISP want to sell me a leased line. Some are reluctant, almost unwilling to sell anything but a asymmetric broadband saying all schools need leased lines. I have looked repeatedly at our traffic graphs and tested our 80:20 Mb/s fttc, and on average we only use around 30mb/s with peaks...and tests show no contention with sharing during the day, nor throttling. And upload data rates barely rise above 5mb/s. After adding BYOD for students we added a virgin 50:5 mb/s connection in a load balancing arrangement. Still graphs are well within our limits and everyone says how quickthe Internet is. Yes, we do use a proxy/cache which supplies around 40% of requests. I can see that at some point using loads of cloud storage this might change, and yes our email server is hosted on site. Do schools really need expensive leased lines now that fttc is so fast? Virgin business are even offering 200 Mb/s unlimited un-throttled during day for a lot less than a leased line a lot cheaper than leased line. Do others just go with what suppliers advise or do they really require high upload speeds of leased lines....and if so...what are these schools doing that we are not? We even use void with fttc without issues.

When you get it all working - perhaps you could put together some notes to ell me how its done. A bit like the grand old duke, I've been up and back down this path several times. I am somewhat reluctant to simply move Email to the cloud - partly because I don't know what the band width implication will be for users, partly because I know how to manage a local Exchange box, but have to get my hands dirty with shell scripts to manage Office 365 Email. And there is the hassle of migrating all the inboxes. And with a local copy of email - at least I can back it up easily and with almost no extra cost. Slightly wary of getting myself into limbo when email either doesn't go to either place, or can't be retrieved from both places. Lots of Online guides of course - and if everything went to plan it should be fine. As I said - please update to tell us how you get on.

The problem with RM safety net is that there are no reporting tools. So its not possible to examine logs and ask the question what websites were access from that station yesterday? And who was logged on to it at the time? Nor will you get feedback about what searches are been done in google. Given the focus on safety in schools, I'm not sure this measures up to what the government is suggesting is required. It is - however fantastic value for money when you use RM as an ISP. You can buy an add on for Draytek routers that provide DNS based filtering which lightening fast - and provides the same stop/go functionality as RM, including granular control over what is blocked or not. At only £60 a year its pretty good value for money. You could of course go free using squid and Dans Guardian on a Linux box - and you would be able to examine the logs - but there are no pretty reporting tools like you get with a commercial product.

I've only bought and used Netgear switches for the last 30 years or so. I often buy second hand models and update the firmware - you can get some real bargains. They are not fantastic - but value for money is hard to beat. No significant problems. I'm not a fan of the GUI varying (seemingly unnecessarily) between one model and a later model, but I can understand that they are not necessarily going to update the interface on aging models. We use 10G at the core - well - 24G as the core switches are stacked via fibre in a redundant ring. We use VLANs, LACP redundant links to remote switches etc - all without issue. If anything the latest switches, firmware and GUI have more quirks than stuff that has been around for while - but I guess that is the same for most devices by every manufacturer. Never been sold on their wireless kit and routers though.

I've had a whole load of problems with genuine Netgear Gbics. Started buying cheap ones for £12 from China - and not had any failures or RX/TX errors. I even use cheap XFP and SFP+ modules now - no problems whatsoever - and you can afford to have a box a spares (although I've not needed them)

"You also have to question will we ever need more than 1000Mbps per wired client device?" Ho Ho Ho! Some of us are old enough to remember that 10Mb/s was impossibly large and our first hard disk was 5MB (yes, and a floppy was 100K). Couldn't think why we would ever need more - not foreseeing the need to deal with Multimedia. Right now - 1Gb/s to desktop seems fine - but keep in mind that a new "ac" access point needs in excess of that - at least on paper - and phase 2 access points with MU-MIMO (and yes - your really will want that - because for lots of devices in a classroom its going to be fantastic). Frankly - if I was putting in new cabling I would be putting in CAT7 - and CAT 8 is in development. My guess is that you really will be doing video editing across the network and external internet connections to the school will be in excess of 1Gb/s. Using CAT5 E because it goes around a corner is pretty unhelpful when you want to deliver PoE (and some APs need "AT") over it.

Much better if you can limit by "application - like YouTube"- or "class of application - like streaming media" - but Meru does not have any layer 7 application detection to allow it to do this. Not sure about Ruckus - but Meraki does it well of course - and Aerohive. If you simply limit the bandwidth by SSID - it just gets annoying if your web access is limited.