On Sat, 19 May 2001, Phil Driscoll wrote:
The kids (sadly!) use Powerpoint for multimedia, a language lab which produces large quantities of audio files. They use Photoshop in art, Cubase in music and so on. In short, they have every excuse to use up loads of disc space!
Do they know about using efficient file formats for e.g. audio/picture data? It might be worth making it a network policy that inefficient formats (.bmp, .wav etc) are banned - you could easily set up an automated routine to scan for such files and e-mail warnings to the owners, or even to automatically convert them to a more efficient format.
Build 5 machines with plenty of RAM, 4 large IDE drives on hardware IDE RAID controllers. Each machine will be assigned to a year group, and so will effectively stay with a child for their entire stay at school. This should spread the load nicely, and if we site the servers on different segments of the network we can at least go some way to avoid saturating one segment although short of physically replugging things in sync with the school timetable, I don't know how we would optimise this.
Bring each segment up to one switch, connect each of these `top-level' switches to a switch shared with the servers. As long as there is very little traffic that isn't of the form server<->workstation, then this will be optimal because the `top of tree' switch will effectively act to dynamically rewire the servers into the appropriate `top-level' switch. Make sure that the `top of tree' switch is a decent one (with cut-through switching and enough intra-switch bandwidth to support full duplex connections on each port simultaneously). Also make sure that you don't introduce any bottlenecks between the `top-level' switches and the servers: make sure that all intervening links run at full duplex at the fastest data rate you can get (1Gbps would not be too fast). And lastly, although you're probably already doing this, don't use any hubs if you can possibly avoid it - stick to switches. At anything higher than 10Mbps, hubs cause major problems. Michael